Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers in Guam and Israel-Palestine

by Evyn Lê Espiritu

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in

Rhetoric

and the Designated Emphasis

in

Critical Theory

in the

Graduate Division

of the

University of California, Berkeley

Committee in charge:

Professor Trinh T. Minh-ha, Chair Professor Daniel Boyarin Professor Colleen Lye Professor Keith Feldman

Summer 2018

Abstract

Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers in Guam and Israel-Palestine

by

Evyn Lê Espiritu

Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric

with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Trinh T. Minh-ha, Chair

Archipelago of Resettlement charts the routes and roots of postwar Vietnamese refugees to two understudied sites of diasporic resettlement. From April to November 1975, the U.S. military processed over 112,000 Vietnamese refugees on Guam; from 1977 to 1979, Israel granted asylum and citizenship to 366 non-Jewish Vietnamese refugees. Theorizing the figure of the archipelago, this dissertation charts connections between non-contiguous, seemingly disparate sites of analysis. Despite important differences between these two case studies, Guam and Israel-Palestine are connected via two interrelated nodes of political violence. First, both are strategic sites of U.S. military empire. Second, both are spaces of settler colonialism. Vietnamese refugees absorbed into these spaces must grapple with what this dissertation calls the “refugee settler condition”: the vexed positionality of subjects whose very condition of political legibility via citizenship is predicated upon the unjust dispossession of an Indigenous population.

Organized into three sections of two chapters each, Archipelago of Resettlement reconfigures understandings of both space and time. “Part I: Uncovering Sourcings” focuses on the pre-1975 period prior to Vietnamese refugee resettlement, offering an alternative genealogy of Asian American politics and a diasporic history of Third World Liberation. Chapter one re-remembers an occluded genealogy of Asian American political subjectivity. Rather than accept Guam and Israel-Palestine as relatively recent concerns for the field of Asian American studies, this chapter insists on the foundational influence of U.S. settler militarism in Guam, and American support of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine, in shaping the emergence of an Asian American racial politics in the late 1960s. Chapter two theorizes and exemplifies a method of diasporic history: one that traces connections between seemingly unrelated spaces and times in order to illuminate contours of power—in this case, U.S. military empire—and articulate points of coalition between differentially-situated struggles against this structure of power—such as the contemporaneous decolonial movements in Vietnam, Palestine, and Guam.

“Part II: Tracing Passages” analyzes the passage of Vietnamese refugees to Guam in 1975 and to Israel in 1977 and 1979, mapping archipelagoes of settler colonialism and U.S. empire. Drawing

1 heavily from original archival research conducted at the Micronesian Area Research Center (MARC) and the Israel State Archives (ISA), this section critiques the settler colonial institutions’ moral cooptation of the Vietnamese refugee crisis, identifying how such institutions—the U.S. military on Guam and the Israeli government in Israel—used humanitarian rhetoric in order to direct attention away from ongoing Indigenous dispossession. Such humanitarian rhetoric positioned Vietnamese refugees in an antagonistic relationship to Indigenous struggles for decolonization, since the refugee figure was coopted to re-justify the benevolent power of the military and the state. Both chapter three, which focuses on Guam, and chapter four, which focuses on Israel-Palestine, end with instances of refugee refusal: that is, the refusal to conform to the script of the “good refugee” and to ventriloquize state narratives of military and governmental benevolence, in the face of ongoing settler colonial violence.

“Part III: Unsettling Resettlements” examines cultural texts depicting the refugee settler condition in Guam and Israel-Palestine. How was the late 1970s moment of archipelagic Vietnamese refugee resettlement remembered, represented, and reconfigured? How do Vietnamese refugee settlers relate to ongoing Chamorro efforts for decolonization and Palestinian struggles for liberation? Chapter five reads three quotidian texts—a Chamorro high school student’s article, a Vietnamese refugee repatriate’s memoir, and a mixed Chamorro-and- Vietnamese college student’s blog—to query the temporality of settler militarism on Guam. Unlike other forms of settler colonialism, in which the settler articulates an affective permanent attachment to the land, settler militarism on Guam is marked by the transient nature of militarized bodies that circulate between U.S. bases, eluding traditional forms of settlement. The politics of staying, of (re)settling, then, resonates very differently on Guam than in other settler colonial contexts. Chapter six grapples with the overlapping temporalities of multiple claims to the land of Israel-Palestine. Both Jewish Zionists and displaced Palestinians claim nativity to the land of historic Palestine. Thrust into this conflict, Vietnamese refugees, who were absorbed by the State of Israel in the late 1970s, were forced to navigate the conflicting temporal claims of these two populations. In order to navigate these temporal entanglements, this chapter draws from Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti’s assertion that “Our homeland is the shape of the time we spent in it.” This chapter concludes by examining the archipelagic movement of the refugee settler condition, from Israel-Palestine back to Vietnam. What happens when Vietnamese Israelis, whose lands were confiscated and redistributed by the post-1975 Communist government of Vietnam when they left as refugees, return to reclaim their lands? This chapter analyzes the film The Journey of Vaan Nguyen to argue that another way that Vietnamese Israelis and Palestinians can begin to articulate an emergent vocabulary of potential parallels across the impasses of settler colonialism is by juxtaposing the uneven similarities between their two populations’ respective histories of land dispossession.

Archipelago of Resettlement concludes with a gesture towards futurities. An afterword discusses works of Vietnamese diasporic speculative fiction to query how an archipelagic Vietnamese refugee sensibility can point us towards an ethical response to the contemporary Syrian refugee crisis, and how the refugee histories analyzed in this dissertation promise to haunt and shape our futures.

2 Acknowledgements

This dissertation is the product of many different questions, conversations, and insights. Special thanks to my committee members, Professors Trinh T. Minh-ha, Daniel Boyarin, Colleen Lye, and Keith Feldman, for believing in the project and for challenging me to think deeply and theoretically; to everyone I met and interviewed in Vietnam, Guam, and Israel-Palestine, for welcoming me and sharing their stories; to my fellow graduate student interlocutors, especially Rachel Haejin Lim, who provided critical feedback on my writing; to my partner, Ashvin Gandhi, for his endless friendship and support; and to my family, especially my mother and grandmother, who taught me what it means to be a fierce refugee.

i Table of Contents

Introduction: Nước: Archipelogics and Land/Water Politics ...... 1

Part I: Uncovering Sourcings: Alternative Genealogies and Diasporic Histories Chapter 1: Homebase or Promised Land: Establishing Guam and Israel-Palestine’s . . . 31 Influence on Asian American Political Subjectivity Chapter 2: Vietnam, Palestine, Guam: A Diasporic History of Struggles for ...... 55 Decolonization

Part II: Tracing Passages: Archipelagos of Settler Colonialism, U.S. Empire, and Refugee Refusal Chapter 3: Operation New Life: Vietnamese Refugees and U.S. Settler Militarism . . . 89 on Guam Chapter 4: Refugees in a State of Refuge: Vietnamese Israelis and the Question . . . . 112 of Palestine

Part III: Unsettling Resettlements: The Refugee Settler Condition in Guam, Israel- Palestine, and Vietnam Chapter 5: Refugee-Chamorro Encounters: Grappling with the Temporality of . . . . . 141 Settler Militarism on Guam Chapter 6: The Politics of Translation: Diasporic Rhetorics of Return in ...... 158 Israel-Palestine and Vietnam

Afterword: Refugee Futurities: Floating Islands on a Horizon of Care ...... 181

Bibliography ...... 191

ii Introduction: Nước: Archipelogics and Land/Water Politics

“In Vietnamese, the word for water and the word for a nation, a country, and a homeland are one and the same: nước.” -lê thi diem thúy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For

“Beirut was the birthplace for thousands of Palestinians who knew no other cradle. Beirut was an island upon which Arab immigrants dreaming of a new world landed.” -Mahmoud Darwish, Memory of Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982

“ . . . Remember: home is not simply a house, village, or island; home is an archipelago of belonging.” -Craig Santos Perez, “Off-Island Chamorros”

~ ~ ~

Vietnam is nước: water, country, homeland. Land and water. Water is land. A duality without division; a contrast without contradiction. Nước Việt Nam: a home, a cradle, a point of departure. One island in an archipelago of diasporic belonging.

~ ~ ~

According to Vietnamese mythology, Vietnam was born out of the consummation of water and land. Âu Cơ, the mountain fairy, fell in love with Lạc Long Quân, the sea dragon king. Their union produced an egg sac, out of which hatched a hundred human children, Bách Việt. But she longed for the mountains, and he longed for the sea, and they separated, dividing the children amongst themselves to populate the land and water of Vietnam. Perhaps this originary division of a mother’s children foretold another separation: the division of North and South Vietnam along the 17th parallel in 1954, the violent reunification of Vietnam under Communist rule in 1975, following decades of civil war and American intervention, and the subsequent flight—by air, by boat—of a Vietnamese refugee diaspora, fleeing a war-torn country and a retributive Communist regime. They left by air and they left by sea; they touched on land and were washed in water. Vietnamese refugees resettled around the world, creating small islands of belonging in their countries of asylum. But islands need not be isolated. As the ocean connects the islands of a larger archipelago—what Oceania scholar Epeli Hau’ofa famously termed a “sea of islands”—so too does nước connect the islands of an archipelago of Vietnamese refugee resettlement: a postwar diaspora held together by the fluid memory of a beloved homeland, lost to war.1

~ ~ ~

Yêu nước: to love one’s country, “[t]he highest virtue demanded of a Vietnamese”2 Mất nước: to lose one’s country, “to be without the life source of water”3

1 Làm nước: to make water, to quell the thirst of a parched heart

~ ~ ~

Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers in Guam and Israel-Palestine charts the routes and roots of postwar Vietnamese refugees to two understudied sites of diasporic resettlement. From April to October 1975, Guam—an unincorporated territory of the United States—served as the first major U.S. processing center for Vietnam War refugees. Over 112,000 refugees passed through Guam before gaining citizenship in the United States, Canada, Australia, and France. Coined Operation New Life, this military project transformed the island of Guam, a strategic U.S. military outpost in the Pacific, into a postwar humanitarian refuge. Such humanitarian rhetoric overwrote, however, the U.S. military’s continual dispossession of the Indigenous Chamorro population, via the appropriation of their land, language, and lifestyle. Today, Vietnamese Americans who chose to stay on Guam instead of passing on to the North American continent must grapple with their placement on Indigenous Chamorro land. In June 1977, newly-elected Prime Minister Menachem Begin absorbed sixty-six Vietnamese refugees into the State of Israel as his first official act in office, citing parallels with the plight of Jewish Holocaust refugees three decades earlier. Two more groups of Vietnamese refugees would follow, bringing the total population of resettled Vietnamese Israeli refugees to 366. This case marks the first time that Israel offered asylum and eventual citizenship to non- Jewish subjects. Furthermore, the case remains an exception within Israel’s strict asylum policy, which continues to displace and dispossess Palestinian refugees and exiles, as well as turn away asylum seekers from Eritrea, Sudan, and Syria. By virtue of their citizenship, Vietnamese Israelis remain implicated in Israel’s settler colonial foundation and ongoing processes of occupation, raising the question of their relationship to Palestinian struggles for liberation. In some ways, Guam and Israel-Palestine represent radically different case studies in the history of Vietnamese refugee resettlement. While Guam served primarily as a temporary processing center for Vietnamese refugees, Israel-Palestine functioned as a country of permanent absorption. Furthermore, the class and ethnic backgrounds of the refugees in these two case studies differ. Vietnamese refugees who were airlifted to Guam in 1975 aboard American helicopters and military planes were well-connected, highly-educated, and generally of higher class status. This group, the first wave of Vietnam War refugees, consisted of anti-Communist politicians of the fallen Republic of Vietnam, high-ranking officials of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), and individuals connected to the U.S. government, military, or embassy— in other words, the people most politically vulnerable to retribution after the Fall of Saigon in April 1975. In contrast, Vietnamese refugees who ended up in Israel-Palestine were part of the second wave of Vietnam War refugees, who escaped primarily by boat. From 1977 to 1979, over a quarter million refugees fled Vietnam due to the new government’s radical reorganization of society, which included drastic changes to the national economy (a new currency system, state seizure of private businesses, and the forced relocation of urban families to rural “new economic zones”), the political repression and public downfall of anti-Communist sympathizers, and the incarceration of remaining South Vietnamese government and army officials in grueling “reeducation camps.”4 These refugees did not have direct connections to American officials, and as a result many drifted aimlessly at sea for days and even weeks, in the hopes of being picked up in international waters and dropped off at a refugee camp of first asylum in Thailand,

2 Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, or Hong Kong. On the waves and in the camps, farmers, fishermen, and uneducated laborers mixed with ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs, low-level South Vietnamese government workers, and former business owners. Many refugees died in search of a new island of belonging. Of the 277,500 people who fled Vietnam, at least 30,000 to 40,000 perished at sea.5 Two-thirds of the refugees’ boats were attacked by pirates, often multiple times before reaching land.6 Those who were fortunate enough to reach a refugee camp in Southeast Asia faced overcrowded conditions, water shortages, hostile host governments, and sometimes years-long periods of statelessness as they awaited permanent resettlement. Images of the boat refugees circulated prominently in the international media, prompting the United Nations High Commission of Refugees (UNHCR) to declare a global crisis. In response, countries around the world, including the State of Israel, declared their humanitarian intent to absorb postwar Vietnamese refugees. Despite these important differences, the cases studies in Guam and Israel-Palestine are connected via two interrelated nodes of political violence. First, both Guam and Israel-Palestine are strategic sites of U.S. military empire. Guam, an unincorporated territory in the Pacific, serves as the “Tip of the Spear” of U.S. military power and a stronghold of American influence in the Asian Pacific.7 Meanwhile the State of Israel, the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid since World War II, acts as a proxy of U.S. influence in what has been termed the Middle East. Given the strategic importance of Vietnam for the consolidation of U.S. empire during the Cold War period, and the U.S. military’s role in bombing and destabilizing the country, it is perhaps unsurprising that Vietnamese refugees fleeing the debris of the Vietnam War ended up resettling in these spaces of U.S. foreign power. That is, longstanding U.S. military influence in these two spaces prefigured the passage of Vietnamese refugees—the product of not only Communist repression but also U.S. military intervention—to them. Inserted into a fluid circuit of U.S. imperial power, Vietnamese refugees washed ashore lands similarly caught up in the flow. Second, both Guam and Israel-Palestine are spaces of settler colonialism. Over a century of U.S. military settlement on the island of Guam—a distinct form of settler colonialism that I identify using Juliet Nebolon’s term “settler militarism” to emphasize the military’s role in land appropriation—has displaced and dispossessed the Indigenous Chamorro population.8 Indeed, the very production of a U.S. military stronghold on Chamorro land made possible U.S. imperial intervention into Vietnam during the war, and the subsequent creation of a displaced Vietnamese refugee population fleeing the results of that war. Meanwhile, the Zionist settlement of Palestine—the creation of a national homeland for Jews persecuted in Europe—disregarded the land claims of the native Palestinian population. The violent foundation of the State of Israel in 1948 as an exclusively Jewish nation resulted in the mass expulsion of around 750,000 Palestinians from within Israel’s 1948 borders: a catastrophe that Palestinians collectively remember as al-Nakba.9 Following the June War of 1967, Israel conquered Gaza and the West Bank, initiating its ongoing colonial occupation of an ever-shrinking space of Palestinian mobility.10 American dollars prop up Israel’s settler colonial regime, implicating American citizens in the continual dispossession of the native Palestinian population, who are denied the Right of Return to their ancestral homes. Vietnamese refugees absorbed into these spaces of settler colonialism must grapple with what I call the “refugee settler condition”: the vexed positionality of subjects whose very condition of political legibility via citizenship is predicated upon the unjust dispossession of an Indigenous population. Refugee settlers are not directly responsible for the settler colonial policies of the state into which they are both interpolated and interpellated. However, their

3 processes of home-making—of creating an island of belonging in their new country of resettlement—do take place on contested land. How then do Vietnamese refugees relate to Indigenous struggles for self-determination? Although the refugee settler condition exists at many sites—such as the continental United States, Canada, and Australia—this dissertation focuses on Guam and Israel-Palestine, exploring how Vietnamese refugees are implicated in ongoing struggles for Chamorro decolonization and Palestinian liberation. The following chapters propose new political vocabularies for articulating emergent solidarities between displaced refugees and Indigenous peoples, across the impasses of settler colonialism.

~ ~ ~

Resettlement: to settle again, after an event of unsettlement Re-settlement: to reproduce the act of producing a settlement Reset-tlement: to settle again, and again and again, to constantly resettle, to never settle, to question the settled status of the resettled

~ ~ ~

Like nước, an archipelago is made up of both water and land. A duality without division; a contrast without contradiction. Land suggests territoriality, and the promise of sovereignty: an indispensable analytic for Indigenous struggles for self-determination, resistant to settler colonial dispossession.11 Water in contrast connotes fluidity, fugitivity, movement, and connectivity: the erosion of borders by the constant waves of the sea. This dissertation uses the figure of the archipelago to map connections between my seemingly disparate sites of analysis: Guam, Israel-Palestine, and Vietnam. According to Lanny Thompson, “archipe-logics” emphasize “discontinuous connections rather than physical proximity, fluid movements across porous margins rather than delimited borders, and complex spatial networks rather than the oblique horizons of landscapes—in sum, moving islands rather than fixed geographic formations.”12 In this dissertation, Guam and Israel-Palestine represent moving islands of Vietnamese refugee resettlement: spaces entangled via a diasporic refugee settler condition. ~ ~ ~

“I believe in the resilience of our bodies because our hearts are 75% hånom and every pulse is i napu: a wave accustomed to breaking” -Craig Santos Perez, from unincorporated territory [lukao]

~ ~ ~

4 The refugee is a figure of movement. According to Yến Lê Espiritu, the refugee embodies “a site of social and political critiques, whose emergence, when traced, would make visible the processes of colonization, war, and displacement” that undergird U.S. military empire. Tracing the archipelago of Vietnamese refugee resettlement in Guam and Israel- Palestine reveals two more forms of critical geography: an archipelago of U.S. empire and an archipelago of Indigenous resistance. Guam and Israel-Palestine: two spaces of differing political status, on the seeming margins of diasporic Vietnamese history. And yet, to recenter these case studies, whose rhetorical significance outweighs their supposed demographic significance, is to manifest the archipelagic nature of U.S. foreign power. Formerly occluded Cold War connections between Vietnam, Guam, and Israel-Palestine prefigured—indeed, set the grounds for—the material passage of Vietnamese refugees to these two sites of resettlement. To trace an archipelago of postwar resttlement, therefore, is to illuminate these occluded connections: how American intervention in the Vietnam War was linked to ongoing U.S. military build-up in Guam and an unwavering support of Israel, even before 1975. To end one’s analysis with this critique of imperial state violence, however, is to reproduce the silence imposed on the supposed subaltern. Indeed, this archipelago of Vietnamese refugee resettlement also reveals a corresponding archipelago of Indigenous resistance: how Chamorro decolonization efforts and Palestinian liberation struggles are connected via the material passage of the Vietnamese refugee figure to these two sites, and the production of a refugee settler condition that then travels back to Vietnam in unexpected ways. Indigenous scholars such as Jodi Byrd have mapped the transnational dimension of locally- situated struggles against settler colonialism, asserting that Indigeneity’s “emphasis on the specificities of origin, place, and belonging” need not pit it against themes of “movement, dispersal, and diaspora.”13 Indigenous resistance unfolds in an archipelagic manner. Tracing the passage of Vietnamese refugees to Guam and Israel-Palestine, two distinct sites of settler colonialism, illuminates connections between these respective struggles for self-determination. One is able to map potentials for solidarity, then, not only between displaced refugees and dispossessed natives at each island of the archipelago, but also across islands, connecting locally-situated struggles for land and livelihood.

~ ~ ~

“In the car, Ma starts to cry. ‘What about the sea?’ she asks. ‘What about the garden?’ Ba says we can come back in the morning and dig up the stalks of lemongrass and fold the sea into a blue square. Ma is sobbing. She is beating the dashboard with her fists. ‘I want to know,’ she says, ‘I want to know, I want to know . . . who is doing this to us?’ Hiccupping she says, ‘I want to know, why—why there’s always a fence.” -lê thi diem thúy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For

~ ~ ~

al-baHr: the sea; the meter, or poetic measure, of Palestinian prosody14

~ ~ ~

5 A note on terms: Some decolonization activists on Guam today have begun to self- identify as “CHamoru” (alternatively spelled “Chamoru”), dismissing “Chamorro” as a product of colonial orthography. Political debates regarding whether or not to officially change the spelling have remained inconclusive.15 Although I am aware of the political implications of the term “CHamoru,” in this dissertation I have chosen to use the more standard spelling, “Chamorro,” to reflect the orthography of my archival documents. I also distinguish between “Chamorro” and “Guamanian.” The latter term originated in the late 1940s, following World War II, when Indigenous Chamorros asked the American naval government to refer to them as Guamanians (in part to distinguish themselves from the Chamorros of the Northern Marianas Islands, who were not American nationals, and in part to identify with the land, as the Hawaiians and Saipanese had done).16 “Chamorro” and “Guamanian” were used interchangeably until the 1970s, when the bourgeoning Chamorro nationalist movement realigned the term “Chamorro” with Indigenous rights. Today, the term “Guamanian” encompasses all of the island’s residents—a population that includes but exceeds that of the native Chamorros—and I use this term when referring to both the Indigenous and settler population on Guam. At the risk of reproducing colonial cartography, I elect to use the colonial term “Guam” rather the Indigenous term “Guåhan” to refer to the island, in order to index the ongoing structure of settler militarism. Similarly, the land to which both Palestinian freedom fighters and Israeli Zionists lay claim is contested, and naming this land is therefore a political act. Throughout this dissertation, I use different terms to refer to the land, depending on context. I use “Israel” when I want to emphasize and implicate Israeli state policies. For example, it is important to note that the Vietnamese refugees live in Israel, and not Palestine; they are a product of Israeli executive action, and were not invited by the native Palestinians. I use “Palestine” when I emphasize Palestinians’ native claim to the space. “Israel-Palestine” refers to the land known as the State of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, marking a bi-national possibility. Lastly, I refer to the displaced Vietnamese as “refugees,” although U.S. officials initially tried to distinguish them as “evacuees.”17 As historian Jana K. Lipman notes, this linguistic switch was politically motivated: “Not only did evacuee lack the drama and compassion that refugee connoted, it also was bereft of international or national rights or obligations; there were not international conventions on evacuees.”18 “Evacuee” however was not a legal term. According to U.S. law, this first wave of displaced Vietnamese persons were actually “parolees,” “a linguistic invention in the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which allowed for ‘temporary admission’ for foreigners who fell outside U.S. immigration law.”19 Despite this linguistic variation, in this dissertation I use the term “refugee” for three main reasons: first, most of the archival documents, particularly those pertaining to Operation New Life, “almost universally referred to the Vietnamese as ‘refugees’ and the military bases as ‘camps’”; second, the term indexes the violent displacement of these people from their homeland; third, the more inclusive term “refugees” highlights affinities between the first wave of displaced Vietnamese, who passed through Guam, and subsequent waves of evacuation.20 Although I acknowledge that the Vietnam War displaced more than those who self-identify as “Vietnamese,” in this dissertation I decline to use the more inclusive term “Vietnam War refugees,” since my sources and argument focus on the racialization of Vietnamese refugees in particular. How Southeast Asian refugees more broadly grapple with impasses of settler colonialism remain the grounds for further inquiry.

~ ~ ~

6 “we are fragmented shards blown here by a war no one wants to remember in a foreign land with an achingly familiar wound our survival depends upon never forgetting that Vietnam is not a word a world a love a family a fear to bury

let people know VIETNAM IS NOT A WAR” - lê thi diem thúy, “shrapnel shards on blue water”

~ ~ ~

Previous scholarship on Vietnamese refugees has focused on the North American continent, examining how the liberal state’s absorption of the refugee reinforces a narrative of nation-state humanitarianism and benevolence. Yến Lê Espiritu identifies this as the “we-win- even-when-we-lose” syndrome: following American defeat in the Vietnam War, the United States rerouted the international conversation on the immorality of imperial intervention by reframing itself as the primary rescuer and liberator of destitute Vietnamese refugees who were fleeing the evils of Communism.21 Represented as “the purported grateful beneficiary of U.S.- style freedom,” the refugee figure was rhetorically deployed to “remake the Vietnam War into a just and successful war” and bolster the narrative of liberalism undergirding American exceptionalism.22 A potentially destabilizing figure of statelessness, the refugee was safely reincorporated, the “national order of things” restored.23 Such scholarship, however, has yet to adequately address the ways in which such refugee reincorporation also reinforced the United States’ status as a white settler colonial state. Indeed, critiques of U.S. military imperialism must take into account to co-constitutive logics of settler colonialism. Jodi Byrd has termed this phenomenon the “transit of empire”—that is, the usage of “executive, legislative, and judicial means to make ‘Indian’ those peoples and nations who stand in the way of U.S. military and economic desires.”24 Note, for example, the U.S. military’s usage of the term “Indian country” to refer to enemy territory, including Vietnam during the war.25 Although the continental U.S. remains an important site for grappling with the refugee settler condition, and a topic for further analysis, the North American context is overrepresented in the existing literature on Vietnamese refugees. In response, this dissertation directs attention to spaces on the seeming margins of U.S. military empire: Guam and Israel-Palestine. It queries: what happens when the refugee is absorbed into illiberal spaces of incomplete sovereignty— Guam as an unincorporated territory and Palestine as a land occupied by the State of Israel? What then is the state of their unsettled belonging?

~ ~ ~

7

“Jewish memory is one of the basic components of the claim to a right in Palestine. Yet it is incapable of admitting that others also possess the sense of memory. Israelis refuse to live side by side with Arab memory. They refuse to admit the existence of this memory, even though one of their mottos is, ‘We will never forget.’” -Mahmoud Darwish, Journal of an Ordinary Grief

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Understanding the political context of Guam in 1975 necessitates the telling—the adamant remembering, in the face of forced forgetting—of a longer history of Chamorro migration, civilization, colonization, dispossession, and resilience. Nearly 4000 years ago, seafarers travelling from Southeast Asia through Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines settled upon what is today called the Marianas archipelago, establishing the matriarchal, clan-based society of the Chamorro people.26 3,800 miles southwest of Hawai’i and 1,500 miles east of the Philippines, this fifteen island archipelago makes up the southern part of a submerged mountain range stretching 1,500 miles north to Japan.27 Chamorros named the largest and southern-most island Guåhan, meaning “we have,” in celebration of the plentiful natural resources.28 In 1521 Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan stumbled upon the Marianas archipelago, and in 1565 Spain officially claimed the island, which they renamed “Guam.” The island was not formally colonized by Spain however until the arrival of Father Diego Luis de Sanvitores and his Jesuit missionaries in 1668, almost a century later.29 Chamorros fought back for almost three decades, but in 1695 they lost their sovereignty to Spain, initiating an era of colonial rule that arguably stretches on into Guam’s present-day occupation.30 During the 200 years of Spanish colonization, the flourishing Chamorro population—up to 100,000 according to some estimates—was reduced to approximately 9,000 due to disease, genocide, and the reorganization of society in Spanish-controlled population centers.31 Despite the drastic cut in numbers, Chamorros demonstrated great resilience, articulating resistance both within and outside and terms of colonial and imperial power.32 Following the Spanish American War and the 1898 Treaty of Paris, Spain divided up the Marianas archipelago between the U.S. and Germany, splitting the Chamorro people into two political entities—a division that persists today.33 Germany took control of the fourteen northern islands of the Marianas archipelago, as well as Palau, the Caroline Islands, and the Marshall Islands, while the U.S. Navy retained Guam as a coaling station to refuel naval ships “involved in Asian adventurism, or in any event where America wished to project its naval power into Asian waters.”34 This marked the start of the U.S.’s imperial expansion across the Pacific and into the Caribbean, since following the Spanish-American War the U.S. acquired not only Guam, but also the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico from Spain, eastern Sāmoa from the Tripartite Convention of 1899, and Hawai’i via illegal annexation.35 The Philippines and Cuba declared independence in June and December 1898 respectively, though the U.S. contested the former in the Philippine-American War (1899–1902), which resulted in the continual American occupation of the Philippines until 1946. Guam, eastern Sāmoa, and Puerto Rico, meanwhile, became indefinite possessions, the constitutionality of which was decided by the Supreme Court over six opinions written in 1901. In these so-called Insular Cases, which referred to islands administered by the War Department’s Bureau of Insular Affairs, the Supreme Court ruled that unlike in incorporated territories that were designated for eventual annexation and statehood, inhabitants

8 of unincorporated territories were granted only partial Constitutional protection: the Constitution does not “follow the flag.”36 Chamorros’ political status remained undetermined by Congress for over five decades, until 1950. Deemed non-citizen “nationals,” Chamorros were thus afforded no formal rights under the naval government. According to American Studies scholar Amy Kaplan, the designation of Guam and the other newly acquired territories as “neither foreign nor domestic was inseparable from a racialized view of its inhabitants as neither capable of self- government nor civilized enough for U.S. citizenship.”37 During this pre-WWII era of U.S. occupation, the U.S. Navy sought to “civilize” the Chamorros and garner patriotic loyalty by establishing colonial education, public health policies, and state-directed economic projects.38 Teaching English was seen as the “primary means to Americanize the Chamorros.” These institutions were far from democratic, however. As former Senator Joe T. San Agustin indicts: Under the Naval Government, education was conducted under a form of racial segregation, which was very similar to the white and black racial segregation in the Southern States. In Guam’s case, there existed two separate school systems, one for white Americans and the other for brown Chamorros. Unlike the situation in the Southern States, there was no pretense of maintaining separate but equal school systems.39 “Civilization” and assimilation, therefore, were always meant to remain unfinished processes. The Naval government suppressed economic development on Guam, imposing a mandatory security clearance that discouraged business investment until 1962, twelve years after the passage of the Guam Organic Act.40 Other protectionist federal trade laws, such as the Jones Act that mandated the usage of American-built vessels, hurt Guam’s merchants.41 In a series of nine petitions to Congress, from 1901 to 1950, Chamorro leaders articulated desires for self-government within the language of American political rhetoric, arguing that their loyalty to America warranted the granting of U.S. citizenship and their inclusion into America’s political sphere.42 However, they were denied by the U.S. Navy who claimed Chamorros were “not prepared for self-government,” for both political and economic reasons.43 Keith Camacho notes the “paradox” marking these pre-1950 Chamorro articulations of political resistance: on one hand, this “move to garner U.S. citizenship in Guam” represented “indigenous efforts to resist U.S. naval rule, but on the other showed indigenous acceptance of American democracy— the same democracy that supports and is supported by the US military.”44 This paradox is marked in turn by the paradox of Guam’s political status: an unincorporated territory that remains a part, yet apart. Early during World War I, Japan declared war on Germany and invaded the Northern Marianas, and during World War II, in December 1941, the Asian imperial power moved to occupy Guam, challenging the U.S.’s imperial hold and forcing the native Chamorros to live in concentration camps, labor on military construction projects, and suffer executions, beatings, and rapes.45 Protesting the brutal Japanese occupation, Chamorros remixed American patriotism into acts of resistance, singing for example “Oh Uncle Sam, Sam, My Dear Uncle Sam/Won’t You Please Come Back to Guam.”46 On 21 July 1944, U.S. forces did return, recapturing Guam from the Japanese that August: an event that is now commemorated on the island as Liberation Day.47 Liberation, however, came with a price. After World War II, the U.S. military transformed the island from “a lonely American outpost surrounded by hostile Japanese islands” into “the center of an American-dominated lake that encompassed the entire western Pacific Ocean,” second in military importance only to Hawai’i.48 In August 1945, Admiral Chester Nimitz requested fifty-

9 five percent of the island’s land for U.S. naval operations, and in 1946 the Land Acquisition Act authorized the Navy Department to acquire private land with minimal—and sometimes no— compensation to the Indigenous Chamorro people.49 Guam’s indeterminate political status was unsustainable however during the Cold War’s ideological reframing of the United States as a bastion of freedom and democracy, in contrast to the authoritarian rule of Soviet Union Communism. Pressured by Chamorro demands for self- government, including a Guam Congress walkout in 1949, as well as support from the Institute of Ethnic Affairs in Washington, D.C.—directed by John Collier, more famously known for his twelve year service as the Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and his involvement in interning Japanese Americans on Native American reservations—the American government finally replaced the naval government with a civilian government.50 Following President Truman’s Executive Order 10077, which transferred control of the territory from the U.S. Navy to the Department of Interior on 7 September 1949, Congress passed the Guam Organic Act, which Truman signed on 1 August 1950. With this act, Congress finally solidified the political status of Guam as an organic, unincorporated territory. “Organic” refers to Guam’s newly “organized” status: the Act functioned as a written constitution establishing three branches of government and a bill of rights. “Unincorporated” disqualified Guam from a path towards statehood, distinguishing it from Hawai’i and Alaska’s former liminal territorial status. Chamorros were granted U.S. citizenship but withheld presidential voting rights, congressional representation, or full constitutional protections.51 Although the Organic Act was lauded as a victory for democracy, Chamorros were not even allowed to vote for their own governor until 1970. In 1972, they were finally granted a Congressional representative, albeit a nonvoting one.52 Although U.S. officials would later point to the Organic Act as an act of Chamorro self-determination, it is important to note that this act was granted unilaterally by Congress, who retained the sole right to modify or revoke the act at any time. Any amendments toward greater self-determination, therefore, would have to be approved by Congress.

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“no page is ever terra nullius—each page infused with myths legends talk story—” -Craig Santos Perez, from unincorporated territory [saina]

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Israel’s absorption of Vietnamese refugees in 1977 and 1979, likewise, needs to be situated in a longer history of Zionist settlement of historic Palestine. Political Zionism originated in late nineteenth century Europe as a heterogeneous secular movement for Jewish nationhood.53 The first recorded usage of the term is attributed to Austrian Jewish writer Nathan Birnbaum in 1892. The longing of Jews to return to Zion—the Biblical term for Jerusalem—had existed for millennia, ever since the expulsion of the Jews from the Holy Land following the destruction of the two temples in Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. and 70 C.E. respectively. However, Theodor Herzl was the first person to fully articulate Zionism as a political project. Herzl’s innovation was to conceive of Judaism as a nationality rather than as a religion: “We are a people, one people.”54 This stemmed from Herzl’s experience growing up as a Hungarian Jew in Vienna. Although raised in a secular family—he did not celebrate his Bar Mitzvah—and eager to assimilate into Viennese society, Herzl faced increasing anti-Semitism in

10 a European world of solidifying nationalistic sentiments. Such nationalist rhetoric conceived of Jewish peoples as a foreign race—a threat to the homogeneity of the nation-state project— regardless of the religiosity of particular Jewish individual. In the words of Moses Hess, an early Zionist: “The German hates the Jewish religion less than the race; he objects less to the Jews’ peculiar beliefs than to their peculiar noses.”55 What was threatening to the European national project was not the practice of Jewish religion, per se, but the alleged biological difference of a perpetually foreign people. Such nationalist fervor in Europe—and the attendant promises of liberty and equality promised by citizenship in a nation-state—inspired Herzl and contemporaneous Zionists to dream of establishing an independent Jewish state. Different locations for such a Jewish state were offered, including New York and Argentina. In 1946, the Vietnamese anti-colonial leader Hồ Chí Minh even suggested Hanoi to David Ben-Gurion as the headquarters of a Jewish government in exile.56 However, Zionist organizations eventually decided on Palestine as the ideal location of a Jewish state, given the religious importance of Jerusalem in Jewish history and the resultant increased chances of attracting Jewish individuals to relocate and settle the land. Jewish historian Michael Brenner identifies five main waves of Jewish immigration, or a term with religious connotations of an accession to Mount Zion.57 Even prior—(עליה) ”aliyah“ to the first wave of Zionist immigration, a series of agricultural settlements were established in Palestine, beginning with the Mikve Israel agricultural school southwest of Jaffa in 1870. However, these settlements also appeared in North and South America, and did not align with Herzl’s plan for a Jewish state. The First Aliyah instead began in 1881 and lasted until 1904. Spurred by anti-Jewish pogroms in Tsarist Russia, Ukraine, and Romania, this wave was initiated by members of Hibbat Zion in Eastern Europe. A more successful Second Aliyah (1905-1914), dominated by a Socialist-Zionist ideology, followed after the death of Herzl and the failed Russian revolution of 1905. This wave consisted of influential individuals such as David Ben-Gurion who would become the State of Israel’s political elite. Under the guidance of Arthur Ruppin, institutions such as the Jewish National Fund, the Palestine Commission, the Anglo-Palestine Bank, and the Palestine Land Development Company began purchasing as much land as possible for the Jewish population. According to settler colonial studies scholar Patrick Wolfe, “No campaign for territorial dispossession was ever waged more thoughtfully.”58 The Third Aliya (1919-1923) and Fourth Aliyah (1920s) consisted of primarily middle-class families from Poland during the interwar period. The Fifth Aliyah—which would become central to Israel’s national narrative in subsequent decades—was dominated by refugees fleeing Hitler’s Nazi regime. By 1936, nearly 400,000 Jewish people lived in the British Mandate of Palestine, constituting almost one-third of the population.59 But what about Palestinians, the native population? Theodor Herzl naively considered Palestine a terra nullius—“a land without a people for a people without a land.”60 And even if there were an Indigenous Arab population, Herzl did not think they would pose a threat to his Zionist project.61 Indeed, some Zionists believed that that Palestinians would welcome the European Jews, once they realized the attendant benefits of Western civilization and technology.62 In The Jewish State, Herzl writes: “And should it happen that men of other creeds and other nationalities come to live among us, we shall accord them honorable protection and equality before the law. We have learned tolerance in Europe.”63 But in Europe the Jews had also learned colonialism, imperialism, and racism, which co-existed paradoxically alongside such liberal sentiments.

11 Following World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, European powers divided up the Middle East. At the San Remo Conference of 1920, the League of Nations assigned the mandate for Palestine to Great Britain, in no small part due to the preceding Balfour Declaration of November 1917, in which British Foreign Secretary A. J. Balfour declared that the British royal government “views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Increasing Jewish immigration and private property accumulation threatened to displace the local Palestinian population, however, which clashed with the newcomers in a series of uprisings.64 Zionist factions differed in their proposed treatment of the Palestinians. Perhaps most contradictory was the Socialist Zionist ideology, which on one hand viewed Palestinians as potential allies—similarly economically exploited and politically disadvantaged—in the struggle against Russia’s Tsar and the Ottoman Empire’s Sultan. On the other hand, their Marxist- inflected emphasis on western labor and technological progress led them to devalue the nomadic lifestyle of many Palestinians. Echoing the Lockean logic of private property used to similarly dispossess Indigenous groups in North America, David Ben-Gurion claimed in 1924 that the “rights of the Arab population to the land of Palestine could not be recognized because they had not worked the land.”65 His words were bolstered by the language of the 1922 British Mandate, which in Article 11 outlined the intention of the British administration to “introduce a land system appropriate to the needs of the country, having regard . . . to the desirability of promoting the close settlement and intensive cultivation of the land.”66 In the early 1930s, a surge of Jewish immigration to Palestine—spurred by Hitler’s National Socialist takeover of Germany—aggravated tensions with local Palestinians, leading to the Palestinian Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. In response, British leaders imposed restrictions on Jewish immigration, turning away Holocaust refugees and angering Zionists in Palestine, who continued to organized illegal immigration for Jewish refugees. The right-wing Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization), led by Menachem Begin, who would go on to absorb Vietnamese refugees as his first act as Prime Minister of Israel in 1977, initiated violent insurrectionist acts against both the British colonists and the native Palestinians. Such violence culminated in the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946, resulting in ninety-one casualties.67 Unable to quell the riots, the British government handed Palestine to the United Nations, which in turn proposed a plan to partition the British Mandate into separate Jewish and Palestinian states. However, on 14 May 1948, the Jewish Agency rejected the 1947 United Nations partition resolution and declared the independence of the State of Israel. Israel’s establishment in 1948 was predicated on the violent dispossession of the Palestinian population, which Edward Said identifies as the painful irony of having been “turned into exiles by the proverbial people of exile, the Jews.”68 Fighting between Jewish armies and Arab League forces had ensued. Roughly 750,000 Arab Palestinians fled their houses, and subsequently 850,000 Jews from the Arab regions moved to Israel.69 According to Israeli journalist Tom Segev, seemingly overnight, “free people—Arabs—had gone into exile and become destitute refugees; destitute refugees—Jews—took the exiles’ places as the first step in their lives as free people. One group lost all they had, while the other found everything they needed—tables, chairs, closets, pots, pans, plates, sometimes clothes, family albums, books, radios, and pets.”70 Since this violent displacement—what Palestinians collectively remember as al-Nakba, or “the catastrophe”—Israeli laws meant to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel have forbidden Palestinians from returning to their homes or reclaiming their property. In sum, the Zionist Law of Return precludes the Palestinian Right of Return.

12 In her 1945 essay “Zionism Reconsidered,” Hannah Arendt predicted the plight of Palestinians in 1948.71 In his analysis of Arendt’s writings, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin explains that Arendt foresaw that the 1947 United Nations partition resolution would lead to the forced expulsion of Palestinians, given the “program of transfer [that] was inherent in the resolution’s logic”: “She demonstrated that it was not the refusal of the Palestinians, but the forced implementation of the partition that determined the evacuation of most of the Palestinian population from the lands of the Jewish state.”72 Arendt later developed her analysis of the very foundations of statelessness in her 1951 text, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Although focused primarily on the post-war European context of nation-state formation—which itself exasperated the racist exclusion of Jewish peoples and inspired Herzl’s theorization of a Jewish state—one paragraph in the oft-cited chapter nine, entitled “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” references Israel’s settler colonial establishment: After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely by means of a colonized and then conquered territory—but this solved neither the problems of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of the century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.73 Arendt argued that the establishment of nation-states was inherently tied to the creation of stateless refugee populations. :galut) and anti-cosmopolitan ,גלות) Indeed, taken to its extreme, Zionism is anti-Diaspora a repetition of the same European nation-state logic—one state for one people—that led to the nationalistic expulsion of Jews from European nations in the first place. According to Wolfe, “In forging the New Jew on the ground of dispossession in Palestine, Zionism was exorcising the diaspora . . . from the Jewish soul.”74 Instead of encouraging the peaceful coexistence of multiple races and nations in a single state, Zionism sought to solidify a national Jewish body politic: a process that would mask existing racial inequalities between different Jewish groups, and inevitably lead to the expulsion of another racialized population, the non-Jewish Palestinians.75 In order to mask this inherent process of refugee production, however, the liberal nation- state enacts simultaneous policies of refugee absorption, accepting a limited amount of refugees into the national fold in order to maintain the appearance of a post-World War II order of nation- state benevolence. Such logic partially explains Israel’s absorption of 366 Vietnamese refugees in the late 1970s. In sum, Israel simultaneously represented itself as a Western humanitarian nation modeled after the U.S. and capable of contributing to the global Southeast Asian refugee rescue efforts, and a Jewish nation of refugees uniquely positioned to empathize with the Vietnamese refugees’ plight, in order to overwrite criticisms of Israel’s dispossession, settler colonialism, and occupation in Palestine.

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According to recent estimates, there are: 4,000,000 Vietnamese living in diaspora76 147,798 Chamorros living in diaspora77 7,500,000 Palestinians living diaspora/forced exile78

13 Settler colonialism: when the number of those living in the diaspora exceeds those living in the homeland79

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The figure of the “archipelago” visualizes the interconnected relationalities between my non-contiguous, seemingly disparate sites of analysis: Vietnam, Guam, and Israel-Palestine. Indeed, the archipelago has served as “a salient spatial metaphor for political geographers.”80 But let us ground the metaphor of the archipelago in the specificity of this project’s sites of analysis. As discussed above, Guam is actually part of a larger archipelago of Indigenous Chamorro land, the Mariana Islands, that due to centuries of colonial occupation—Spanish, German, Japanese, and American—has been divided into two distinct political entities: the unincorporated territory of Guam and the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands. To retain an archipelagic imaginary, therefore, is to resist this colonial-imposed division. Palestine is less obviously an archipelago, in the literal sense. However, in a speculative map entitled “L’archipel de Palestine orientale” (“The Archipelago of Eastern Palestine”), French artist Julien Bousac demonstrates how Israeli settlement and occupation in the West Bank has led to increasingly non-contiguous spaces of Palestinian sovereignty, ever chipping away at the promise of an independent Palestinian state. The maps reflects the A/B/C zoning that came out of the 1995 Oslo II Accords: Area A is administered exclusively by the Palestinian Authority, whose limited sovereignty was established by the 1993 Oslo Accords; Area B is administered by both the Palestinian Authority and the State of Israel; and Area C, which contains the Israeli settlements, is administered exclusively by the State of Israel. On the map, Area C and East Jerusalem are depicted as blue water, while Areas A and B are distinguished by different shades of green. The resulting archipelago of Palestinian islands draws attention to the ongoing fragmentation of Palestinian life, and the need to actively forge connections of resistance across the gulfs of Israeli surveillance and jurisdiction. The bright colors, tropical palm trees, and red campsite symbols that decorate this map give it a tourist-like quality of, in Bousac’s words, “seemingly paradise-like islands.”81 Such a fantasy is undercut however by the insertion of blue warship icons, labeled Zone sous surveillance (Zone under surveillance), which mark the location of permanent Israeli checkpoints. Likewise, fanciful island designations such as Ile au Miel (Honey Island) and Ile aux Moutons (Sheep Island) are juxtaposed against more obvious referents—Ile Sainte (Holy Island) for Bethlehem, Ile Capitale (Capital Island) for Ramallah, and Ile aux Oliviers (Isle of the Olive Trees) in honor of the ancestral Palestinian groves—and more chilling titles, such as Ile sous le Mur (Island beneath the Wall) to designate the area just south of the Western Wall in Jerusalem and east of the apartheid wall separating the West Bank from Israel. Lastly, the figure of the archipelago privileges both land and water, a dialectic captured in the Vietnamese term nước. Nước, then, with its dual denotations of land and water, country and fluidity, can embody a deterritorialized form of homemaking—one that encompasses ethical belonging for refugees resettled on contested land. Nước can capture the seeming paradox of being Indigenous in the diaspora. Nước can reshape the gulf between exile and home.

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14 “And there will be times when we’ll feel adrift, without itinerary or destination. We’ll wonder: What if we stayed? What if we return? When the undertow of these questions begins pulling you out to sea, remember: migration flows through our blood like the aerial roots of i trongkon nunu. Remember: our ancestors taught us how to carry our culture in the canoes of our bodies. Remember: our people, scattered like stars, form new constellations when we gather.” -Craig Santos Perez, “Off-Island Chamorros”

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An archipelago invites specificity and relationality. One must attend to the specificity of each island, each site of analysis: language, culture, history, racial formation. But one must also analyze the islands in relation to one other: to trace the nước that connects them, and to understand how meaning is made in assemblage. So too with diaspora. One understands diaspora as a network of interconnected communities, organized around the memory of nước, a homeland: real, idealized, lost, or imagined. All diasporias are archipelagic. The archipelago maps the spatiality of diaspora. Éduoard Glissant, in Poetics of Relation, maps out a method of relational—rather than comparative—analysis.82 Instead of identifying two or more islands as distinct, self-contained entities, and charting the similarities and differences between them, a relational approach recognizes how islands are co-constituted, materially, culturally, and rhetorically. Likewise, this project maps out how Vietnam, Guam, Israel-Palestine, and the United States—as spaces, peoples, and rhetorical signifiers—shaped one another during the Cold War-era of Third World Liberation, the post-1975 Southeast Asian refugee crisis, and the contemporary moment of ongoing settler colonialism and refugeehood. These capacious terms are analyzed in an archipelagic fashion, charting surprising connections and forging new solidarities. Such a relational perspective as proffered by Glissant could only come from the Global South: from a postcolonial poet of the archipelagic Antilles. The colonizer may have the luxury of isolating islands into discrete units of analysis: a form of divide-and-conquer. But the postcolonial poet always articulates himself in relation to the colonizer, and to other poets. His poetics of liberation depend on relationality.

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Water: nước that which surrounds Guam and connects it to Oceania that which is denied to Palestinians in Gaza that which sustains Vietnam, born out of the land and sea

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Every project must acknowledge its nước: its source and sourcings, the intellectual water fount from which it flows.83

15 Previous scholarship has invoked the archipelago to map patterned logics of incarceration, imperialism, militarization, and securitization.84 In 1975, the same year as the Fall of Saigon and Operation New Life on Guam, Michel Foucault published Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, which identified a “carceral archipelago” of physically dispersed, seemingly disparate institutions—penal colonies, factory-convents, moral improvement associations—that together revealed the historic emergence of a carceral logic in mid-nineteenth century Europe.85 In an interview the following year, Foucault stressed the importance of geographical concepts such as the archipelago in deciphering “precisely the points at which discourses are transformed in, through and on the basis of relations of power.”86 Shifting the frame of reference from Europe to the United States, in 2010 Lanny Thompson coined the term “imperial archipelago” to identify how U.S. foreign power manifested an archipelagic nature following the U.S. acquisition of Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and later Hawai’i in 1898, after the Spanish American War.87 Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens’ recent edited volume, Archipelagic American Studies, evidences the increasing importance of the archipelago for the field American Studies.88 They advocate a spatial and epistemological shift, asking what American history and cultural studies told from the perspective of island spaces, rather than the continent, might entail. Such an emphasis on mobility does not disregard the fixity of land, however, and the centrality of land to Indigenous struggles for self-determination. This project joins a growing dialogue between Indigenous Studies and Asian American Studies that grapples with the vexed complicity of the Asian “settler” in structures of settler colonialism.89 Asian individuals—many of them subject to histories of oppression and labor exploitation themselves—are not directly responsible for settler colonial policies. However, as bodies on contested land, they are implicated in what Patrick Wolfe has called the “elimination of the native.”90 How do we name such Asian settlers? Jodi Byrd borrows the term “arrivant” from Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite to describe slaves and coolies forcefully brought to the Americas via European and Anglo-American colonialism and imperialism.91 Put more strongly, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang assert that “Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, non-white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in the resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism.”92 Meanwhile, Iyko Day uses “alien” to index the particular racialization of Asian settler laborers simultaneously rendered perpetual foreigners, while Yu-ting Huang prefers the terms “co-colonizer” and “minor settler” to portray Chinese migrants who immigrated to various Pacific islands in search of viable work.93 Other scholars in this field have grappled with the history of Japanese American internment on Native American reservations; with Asian-Indigenous encounters in Alaska, Hawai’i and Guam; and with the growing centrality of Palestine in Asian Americanist critiques of U.S. empire.94 To this conversation Archipelago of Resettlement contributes the “refugee settler condition”—the vexed positionality of formerly stateless refugees living on stolen Indigenous land.95 Archipelago studies and Asian Settler Colonialism studies have yet to consider the figure of the refugee. The refugee suggests fluidity, mobility, and the crossing of borders. Refugee traces map out an archipelago of interrelations. Even when the refugee is fixed—absorbed and granted citizenship in a settler colonial state—s/he undermines the stability of the nation-state structure upon which settler colonialism depends by necessitating the legal absorption of a figure of difference and calling into the question the assumed homogeneity of the national body politic.

16 Giorgio Agamben asserts that the refugee is “nothing less than a limit concept that radically calls into question the fundamental categories of the nation-state.”96 If we extend the temporality of refugeehood beyond the event of absorption, of legal resettlement, we can begin to articulate a form of refugeeist critique, in the vein of Kandice Chuh’s “Asian Americanist critique”—what Yến Lê Espiritu has called a “critical refugee studies.97 What is at stake in this examination of the “refugee settler condition” is not the structure of racial capitalism or European colonialism per se, as is the case with previous studies of Asian (American) settlers, but rather the circulation of a human rights regime that privileges the figure of the Vietnamese refugee in order to legitimize settler colonial claims to liberal democracy. This difference in emphasis, from the subject of the laborer to that of the refugee, marks a shift from the logic of capitalist exploitation to one of moral cooptation: that is, the logic of the settler state to present itself as a moral actor responsive to refugee needs, in order to direct attention away from ongoing state policies of Indigenous dispossession. This analysis builds on Samuel Moyn’s historical genealogy of human rights as incompatible with anticolonial ideals of collective emancipation, Didier Fassin’s critique of “humanitarian reason,” and Neda Atanasoski’s condemnation of “humanitarian violence” as a system of postsocialist imperialism based on humanitarian ethics, that was used to justify U.S. military intervention abroad during the 1960-90s.98 Read critically, against the grain, the refugee settler condition holds the promise of ethical, archipelagic resistance. As argued throughout this dissertation, it can activate a particular politics of deterritorialization in order to model a means of pluralized home-making, attendant to Indigenous claims to the land.

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“[R]efuse to take for granted the naming process. To this end, the intervals between refuge and refuse, refused and refuse, or even more importantly, between refuse and refuse itself, are constantly played out. If, despite their relation, noun and verb inhabit the two very different and well-located worlds of designated and designator, the space in- between them remains a surreptitious site of movement and passage whose open, communal character makes exclusive belonging and long-term residence undesirable, if not impossible. Passage: the state of metamorphosis; the conversion of water into steam; the alternation of an entire musical framework.” -Trinh T. Minh-ha, “An Acoustic Journey”

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The passage of nước: Re(fugee)settlement flows into Re(fuse)settlement

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The archipelago visualizes a refugee diaspora, drawing connections between islands of refugee settler un/belonging. But spatiality is entangled with temporality. So what is the temporality of the archipelago? What is the role of time in Archipelago of Resettlement? By emphasizing circular flows and wayward connections, the archipelago disrupts a linear schema of what Walter Benjamin famously identified as “homogeneous, empty time.”99 It simultaneously elongates the temporality of refugeehood—refusing to disappear with the event

17 of absorption—and dwells with the space-time of the passage, the interval of in-between. That is, while the concept of diaspora by itself risks a flattening of time and a disavowal of the historic point of originary dispersal, an archipelago of diaspora enables one to re-remember the painful history of refugee passage, what Vinh Nguyen calls “oceanic spatiality—the waterscape of the boat and of the sea.”100 The nước of the archipelago flows between different island communities of Vietnamese resettlement, as well as between different periods in that passage towards resettlement—a process that is itself constantly remade and reiterated anew.101 Organized into three semi-chronological sections of two chapters each, Archipelago of Resettlement reconfigures understandings of both space and time. “Part I: Uncovering Sourcings” focuses on the pre-1975 period prior to Vietnamese refugee resettlement, offering an alternative genealogy of Asian American politics and a diasporic history of Third World Liberation. Chapter one re-remembers an occluded genealogy of Asian American political subjectivity. Rather than accept Guam and Israel-Palestine as relatively recent concerns for the field of Asian American studies, this chapter insists on the foundational influence of U.S. settler militarism in Guam, and American support of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine, in shaping the emergence of an Asian American racial politics in the late 1960s. Readings of Shawn Wong’s Homebase (1979) and Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land (1996) excavate the historical memory of these spaces’ influence, demonstrating how Guam and Israel-Palestine continue to haunt the racial politics of the present in seemingly contradictory ways. Chapter two theorizes and exemplifies a method of diasporic history: one that traces connections between seemingly unrelated spaces and times in order to illuminate contours of power—in this case, U.S. military empire—and articulate points of coalition between differentially-situated struggles against this structure of power—such as the contemporaneous decolonial movements in Vietnam, Palestine, and Guam. Unlike previous models of writing history across multiple continents, such as world history, global history, and transnational history, diasporic history is not organized around a particular empire, superpower, or nation-state.102 Rather, it privileges spaces and peoples on the seeming margins of grand historical narratives, drawing attention to South-South relations: the exchange of political knowledge, military strategy, and solidarity rhetoric between actors of the Global South. Furthermore, diasporic history need not necessarily be organized around a particular ethnic diaspora. Instead, this chapter maps how “Vietnam” as a rhetorical signifier circulated in Guam and Israel-Palestine from 1967 to 1987: the year of the Six Day War in Israel-Palestine to the year of the Commonwealth Act in Guam. The histories and political trajectories of Vietnam, Palestine, and Guam were mutually constituted not only after but also before their prominent roles in both creating and harboring the post-1975 diaspora of Vietnamese refugee resettlement. “Part II: Tracing Passages” analyzes the passage of Vietnamese refugees to Guam in 1975, and to Israel in 1977 and 1979, mapping archipelagoes of settler colonialism and U.S. empire. Drawing heavily from original archival research conducted at the Micronesian Area Research Center (MARC) and the Israel State Archives (ISA), this section critiques the settler colonial institutions’ moral cooptation of the Vietnamese refugee crisis, identifying how such institutions—the U.S. military on Guam and the Israeli government in Israel—used humanitarian rhetoric in order to direct attention away from ongoing Indigenous dispossession. Such humanitarian rhetoric positioned Vietnamese refugees in an antagonistic relationship to Indigenous struggles for decolonization, since the refugee figure was coopted to re-justify the benevolent power of the military and the state. Both chapter three, which focuses on Guam, and chapter four, which focuses on Israel-Palestine, end with instances of refugee refusal: that is, the

18 refusal to conform to the script of the “good refugee” and to ventriloquize state narratives of military and governmental benevolence, in the face of ongoing settler colonial violence. Lastly, “Part III: Unsettling Resettlements” examines cultural texts depicting the refugee settler condition in Guam and Israel-Palestine. How was the late 1970s moment of archipelagic Vietnamese refugee resettlement remembered, represented, and reconfigured? How do Vietnamese refugee settlers relate to ongoing Chamorro efforts for decolonization and Palestinian struggles for liberation? Chapter five reads three quotidian texts—a Chamorro high school student’s article, a Vietnamese refugee repatriate’s memoir, and a mixed Chamorro-and- Vietnamese college student’s blog—to query the temporality of settler militarism on Guam. Unlike other forms of settler colonialism, in which the settler articulates an affective permanent attachment to the land, settler militarism on Guam is marked by the transient nature of militarized bodies that circulate between U.S. bases, eluding traditional forms of settlement. The transience of these individual bodies however masks the permanence of the military as an institution that is responsible for Chamorro dispossession. This transient/permanent paradox is reflected in the temporal nature of Vietnamese refugee resettlement on Guam. For most of the 112,000 refugees who passed through the U.S. processing center on Guam during Operation New Life, the island was but a transient stopping point on their seemingly teleological passage to the continental United States. In this schema, the decision of a small number of Vietnamese refugees to stay on Guam, then, can be read as a subversive act. As refugee settlers, these Vietnamese Guamanians are confronted with the responsibility of attending to their settler positionalities. Unlike their refugee counterparts who passed over and passed through, eluding an engagement with the permanence of U.S. military occupation of Guam, these Vietnamese Guamanians must contend with persistent Chamorro calls for decolonization of the island. The politics of staying, of (re)settling, then, resonates very differently than in other settler colonial contexts. Chapter six grapples with the overlapping temporalities of multiple claims to the land of Israel-Palestine. Both Jewish Zionists and displaced Palestinians claim nativity to the land of historic Palestine. As a “wandering people,” Jewish exiles have articulated a millennia-long desire to return to the Holy Land—an affective attachment that the State of Israel then codified as the Law of Return via the rhetoric of aliyah, infusing Jewish immigration to Israel with the religious connotation of an accession. In practice, however, such a “return” uprooted the native Palestinian population that had been living in their homes for generations, prior to forced displacement. Thrust into this conflict, Vietnamese refugees, who were absorbed by the State of Israel in the late 1970s, were forced to navigate the conflicting temporal claims of these two populations. In order to navigate these temporal entanglements, this chapter draws from Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti’s assertion that “Our homeland is the shape of the time we spent in it.”103 Homeland here is not defined exclusively by space—by an exclusive claim to space—but by time. Critiquing a teleological logic of land rights based on the question of origins—Who was here first? Who owns the original title to the land?—this definition of homeland as a “shape of time” invites a recognition of multiple layers of shapes and times, and by extension a plurality of overlapping claims to the land: Israelites in the Promised Land, Palestinians on their ancestral lands, Vietnamese Israelis in a state of refuge. This chapter concludes by examining the archipelagic movement of the refugee settler condition, from Israel- Palestine back to Vietnam. What happens when Vietnamese Israelis, whose lands were confiscated and redistributed by the post-1975 Communist government of Vietnam when they left as refugees, return to reclaim their lands? This chapter argues that another way that

19 Vietnamese Israelis and Palestinians can begin to articulate an emergent vocabulary of potential parallels across the impasses of settler colonialism is by juxtaposing the uneven similarities between their two populations’ respective histories of land dispossession. Both the Vietnamese government and the Israeli government deny the land claims of the families that fled their lands at the time of the government’s foundation: 1975 and 1948 respectively. Drawing temporal connections between 1975 and 1948, then, illuminates a common struggle around the question of contested land rights: the potential groundwork for political solidarity against the violence of the settler colonial state. Archipelago of Resettlement concludes with a gesture towards futurities. An afterword juxtaposes two works of Vietnamese American speculative fiction—Linh Dinh’s short story, “A Floating Community,” and Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s video installation, “The Island”—to consider how the refugee histories analyzed in this dissertation promise to haunt and shape our futures. Archipelagic interrelations extend beyond the veil of the present into the reaches of the temporal beyond. In this passage with and through the present, we can glimpse implications for the current refugee crises that plague our world. Returning to the writing of Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez and Vietnamese Israeli poet Vaan Nguyen, this afterword queries how an archipelagic Vietnamese refugee sensibility can point us towards an ethical response to the contemporary Syrian refugee crisis.

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“We tumble out the window like people tumbling across continents. We are time traveling, weighed down by heavy furniture and bags of precious junk.” -lê thi diem thúy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For

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lê thi diem thúy, Mahmoud Darwish, Craig Santos Perez, Trinh T. Minh-ha—Shawn Wong and Gish Jen— Edith Iriate, Trần Đình Trụ, and Bianca—Mourid Barghouti, Vaan Nguyen, Edward Said—Linh Dinh and Tuan Andrew Nguyen. The archipelago, understood as method, calls for the cultivation of uncanny parallels and points of articulation, à la Stuart Hall, between the visions and voices of locally-situated artist and writers.104 “Critically juxtaposing” Asian American, Palestinian, Chamorro, Vietnamese Israeli, and Vietnamese American writers and artists—whose work is often isolated into separate islands of analysis—Archipelago of Resettlement illuminates connections between locally-informed concepts of land, war, belonging, and displacement.105 This introduction, for example, has sought to explore how different cultures’ invocations of water—nước, hånom, al-baHr—resonante with, and indeed change, one another via the process of encounter. Held together in an archipelagic assemblage, such words take on new meaning, echoing and reverating through each other, due to the scholar’s labor of critical juxtapostion. Listening to these reverberations—the reverberations of an archipelago of Vietnamese refugee resettlement—offers tools for challenging the archipelago of U.S. empire and for fortifying an archipelago of Indigenous resistance.

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20 “The sound of water is a wedding celebration louder, much louder, than the roar of these jets. The sound of water is a mirror for the living roots of the earth. The sound of water is freedom. The sound of water is humanity itself.” -Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982

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1 Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 152. 2 Huỳnh Sanh Thông, “Live by Water, Die for Water: Metaphors of Vietnamese Culture and History,” The Vietnam Review 1 (Autumn-Winter 1996): 143. 3 Vinh Nguyen, “Nước/Water: Oceanic Spatiality and the Vietnamese Diaspora,” in Migration by Boat: Discourses of Trauma, Exclusion and Survival, ed. Lynda Mannik (New York: Berghanh Books, 2016), 67. 4 Nguyen, 68. 5 Daniel Wolf and Shep Lowman, “Toward a New Consensus of the Vietnamese Boat People,” SAIS Review 10, no. 2 (1990): 103; quoted in Nguyen, “Nước/Water,” 68. 6 Takaki, Ronald T., A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1993), 414. 7 Tiara R. Na’puti and Michael Lujan Bevacqua, “Militarization and Resistance from Guåhan: Protecting and Defending Pågat,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (September 2015): 837. 8 Juliet Nebolon, “‘Life Given Straight from the Heart’: Settler Militarism, Biopolitics, and Public Health in Hawai’i during World War II,” American Quarterly 69, no. 1 (March 2017): 25. 9 Walid Khalidi, ed., All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2006); Rochelle Davis, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds., Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 10 During the war Israel also conquered the Sinai Peninsula, which it later rescinded, and the Golan Heights, the western portion of which remains occupied. 11 “[T]he disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence.” Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 5. 12 Lanny Thompson, “Heuristic Geographies: Territories and Area, Islands and Archipelagoes,” in Archipelagic American Studies, ed. Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 70. 13 Jodi A. Byrd, “American Indian Transnationalisms,” in The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, ed. Yogita Goyal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 177. 14 Muhawi, Ibrahim, “Introduction,” in Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), xxv. 15 For more information on this, see Guampedia’s article, “Chamorro vs. Chamoru,” http://www.guampedia.com/chamorro-vs-chamoru/, accessed 12 May 2017. 16 Cecilia C. T. Perez, “A Chamorro Re-Telling of ‘Liberation,’” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 70. 17 Susan Guffey, “Evacuee Flood Flows On,” Pacific Daily News, 25 April 1975, 3. 18 Jana K. Lipman, “‘Give Us a Ship’: The Vietnamese Repatriate Movement on Guam, 1975,” American Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2012): 7. 19 Lipman, 7. 20 Lipman, 7.

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21 Yến Lê Espiritu, “The ‘We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome: US Press Coverage of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the ‘Fall of Saigon,” American Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2006): 330. 22 Espiritu, 329. 23 Liisa H. Malkki, “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 495–523. 24 Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xx. 25 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 31. 26 Control of lands were “passed from generation to generation through the highest ranking females, the manmaga’haga.” See Carmen Artero Kasperbauer, “The Chamorro Culture,” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 33; Na’puti and Bevacqua, “Militarization and Resistance from Guåhan,” 842; Vicente M. Diaz, “Bye Bye Ms. American Pie: The Historical Relations Between Chamorros and Filipinos and the American Dream,” ISLA: A Journal of Micronesia Studies 3, no. 1 Rainy Season (1995): 149. 27 Craig Santos Perez, “Guam and Archipelagic American Studies,” in Archipelagic American Studies, ed. Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 97. 28 Anthony Leon Guerrero, “The Economic Development of Guam,” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 84. 29 Lipman, “‘Give Us a Ship’: The Vietnamese Repatriate Movement on Guam, 1975,” 6; Carlos P. Taitano, “Political Development,” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 45. 30 Taitano, “Political Development,” 45. 31 Michael F. Phillips, “Land,” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 4. 32 Following Pacific studies scholar Keith L. Camacho, in this dissertation I understand colonialism as “an ambivalent process of control and resistance, adaptation and mutation on the part of the colonized and the colonizer.” Keith L. Camacho, Cultures of Commemoration: The Politics of War, Memory, and History in the Mariana Islands (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011), 16; Vicente M. Diaz describes this as a “two-way flow of power that constrains but also furnishes possible modes (and often competing levels) of indigenous expression and survival.” Vicente M. Diaz, “Repositioning the Missionary: The Beatification of Blessed Diego De Luis SanVitores and Chamorro Cultural and Political History in Guam” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1992), 35 quoted in Camacho, Cultures of Commemoration, 16. During the 16th and 17th centuries, for example, Spanish missionaries re- organized Chamorro social structures around the Catholic Church in a process of violent conquest—replacing for example the traditional guma’uritao, which taught teenagers how to plant, fish, hunt, and contribute to the clan, with missionary schools that taught students to speak, read, and write in Spanish—but Chamorros re-appropriated Catholic signs and symbols into their own Indigenous traditions, identifying resonances between the Spanish God and their supreme being Yu’os, and creating a distinct “Chamorro Catholicism” that one would be mistaken to

23 judge as “inauthentic” or unilaterally imposed from without. See Robert F. Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995), 102–5; Senator Pilar C. Lujan, “The Role of Education in the Preservation of the Indigenous Language of Guam,” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 18–19; Kasperbauer, “The Chamorro Culture,” 30, 35. 33 The 1898 Treaty of Paris established the Philippines and Puerto Rico as unorganized, unincorporated territories of the U.S. as well. After WWII, the Northern Marianas islands (NMI), whose Indigenous populations include Chamorros and Carolinians (Refaluwasch, in their own language), were transferred from Japan to the U.S. In a series of four referenda, the people of the NMI voted in favor of integration with Guam, but in a 1969 referendum the Guamanians rejected integration. In the 1970s, the people of the NMI decided to push for commonwealth status instead of independence, and in 1978, they officially established the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), an insular area and commonwealth of the U.S. 34 Mark Forbes, “Military,” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 41. 35 Werner Levi, “American Attitudes toward Pacific Islands, 1914-1919.,” Pacific Historical Review, American Attitudes toward Pacific Islands, 17, no. 1 (1948): 55. 36 In his dissenting comments, Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan accused the majority opinion in the first of the Insular Cases of rationalizing a colonial system inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution: ‘The idea that this country may acquire territories anywhere upon the earth, by conquest or treaty, and hold them as mere colonies or provinces — the people inhabiting them to enjoy only such rights as Congress chooses to accord to them—is wholly inconsistent with the spirit and genius, as well as with the words, of the Constitution.’ See Downes v. Bidwell, 182 US 244, 372–3. 37 Amy Kaplan, “Where Is Guantanamo?,” American Quarterly 57 (September 2005): 841–42; quoted in Hsuan L. Hsu, “Guahan (Guam), Literary Emergence, and the American Pacific in Homebase and from Unincorporated Territory,” American Literary History 24, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 284. Kaplan continues: The unincorporated territory status created a “two-tiered, uneven application of the Constitution” in which “due process or the right to criminal and civil juries or full protection under the Fourteenth Amendment” was withheld from unincorporated subjects, even as the were treated as U.S. citizens in matters of discipline and taxation (841-842). 38 Christine Taitano DeLisle, “Delivering the Body: Narratives of Family, Childbirth, and Prewar Pattera” (MA thesis, University of Guam, 2001). 39 Joe T. San Agustin, “The Quest for Commonwealth: ‘New Chapter in Guam’s History’’,’” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 120. 40 Guerrero, “The Economic Development of Guam,” 92. 41 Taitano, “Political Development,” 53. 42 Chamorro historian Anne Perez Hattori identifies petitions sent in 1901, 1917, 1925, 1929, 1933, 1936, 1947, 1949, and 1950. Anne Perez Hattori, “Righting Civil Wrongs: Guam Congress Walkout of 1949,” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political

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Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 58–59. 43 David Hanlon, “Patterns of Colonial Rule in Micronesia,” in Tides of History: The Pacific Islands in the Twentieth Century, ed. K. R. Howe, Robert C. Kiste, and Brij V. Lal (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), 113. 44 Camacho, Cultures of Commemoration, 27. 45 Hattori, “Righting Civil Wrongs,” 59; For more on this history, see Camacho, Cultures of Commemoration. 46 Vicente Diaz, “Deliberating Liberation Day: Memory, Culture and History in Guam,” in Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(S), ed. Takashi Fujitani, George White, and Lisa Yoneyama (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 156. 47 Diaz, “Deliberating Liberation Day: Memory, Culture and History in Guam.” 48 Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam, 207. 49 Rogers, 206-33.; Doloris Coulter Cogan, We Fought the Navy and Won (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008); R. D. K. Herman, “Inscribing Empire: Guam and the War in the Pacific National Historical Park,” Political Geography 27 (2008): 630–51. 50 Hattori, “Righting Civil Wrongs”; Cogan, We Fought the Navy and Won. 51 Taitano, “Political Development,” 52–53; Lipman, “‘Give Us a Ship’: The Vietnamese Repatriate Movement on Guam, 1975,” 6. 52 Lipman, “‘Give Us a Ship’: The Vietnamese Repatriate Movement on Guam, 1975,” 6; Taitano, “Political Development,” 53. 53 For a concise history of Zionism, see Michael Brenner, Zionism: A Brief History, trans. Shelley L. Frisch, 2nd printing (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2006). 54 Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Herzl Press, 1970), 33. 55 Moses Hess, The Revival of Israel: Rome and Jerusalem, trans. Meyer Waxman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 58. 56 Judith Apter Klinghoffer, Vietnam, Jews, and the Middle East: Unintended Consequences (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 70. 57 Brenner, Zionism: A Brief History. 58 Patrick Wolfe, “Purchase by Other Means: Dispossessing the Natives in Palestine,” in Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016), 203. 59 Brenner, Zionism: A Brief History, 85. 60 Alan George, “‘Making the Desert Bloom’: A Myth Examined,” Journal of Palestine Studies 8, no. 2 (Winter 1979): 88. 61 Brenner, Zionism: A Brief History, 43. 62 Brenner, 59. 63 Herzl, The Jewish State, 100. 64 Wolfe, “Purchase by Other Means.” 65 Brenner, Zionism: A Brief History, 108. 66 Quoted in Wolfe, “Purchase by Other Means,” 217. Ellipses in Wolfe. Wolfe goes on to further elaborate parallels between Israeli Zionism and US settler colonialism: “Conceptually, the idea of collective ownership on behalf of the Jewish nation diametrically reversed the US ideology of private property, which, as we have seen, demonised Native ownership on the basis of its collective nature. In practical terms, however, the Zionist strategy shared characteristics with US Indian policy, where the collectivity—in that case, the US government—acquired

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Native land and transferred it into ethnically non-Indian hands. In the Zionist case, however, the acquiring had to be effected within the terms of the imperial legal system that could not be swept aside or imposed on in the way that settlers had dealt with Indigenous legal systems in the USA or Australia. This legal system was based on the Ottoman tanzimat land reforms of the mid- nineteenth century, which were largely inherited and maintained by the British during the Mandate era and even, to a significant extent, by the post-Nakba Israeli state.” See Wolfe, “Purchase by Other Means,” 230. 67 Brenner, Zionism: A Brief History, 154. 68 George, “‘Making the Desert Bloom’”; Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 141. Said continues: “Perhaps this is the most extraordinary of exile’s fates: to have been exiled by exiles: to relive the actual process of up-rooting at the hands of exiles. All Palestinians during the summer of 1982 asked themselves what inarticulate urge drove Israel, having displaced Palestinian in 1948, to expel them continuously from their refugee homes and camps in Lebanon. It’s as if the reconstructed Jewish collective experience, as represented by Israel and modern Zionism, could not tolerate another story of dispossession and loss to exist alongside it—an intolerance constantly reinforced by the Israeli hostility to the nationalism of the Palestinians, who for forty- six years have been painfully reassembling a national identity in exile” (141-142). 69 “General Progress Report and Supplementary Report of the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine,” doc.nr. A/1367/Rev.1, (December 11, 1949 to October 23, 1950). 70 Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Owl Books, 1993), 161; quoted in Wolfe, “Purchase by Other Means,” 207. 71 Hannah Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007). 72 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Exile and Binationalism: From Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt to Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish,” Carl Heinrich Berker Lecture (Berlin, 2012), 114. Emphasis added. 73 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 1973), 290. 74 Wolfe, “Purchase by Other Means,” 227. 75 In Judith Butler’s words, Arendt “attempted to show how, for structural reasons, the nation- state produces mass numbers of refugees and must produce them in order to maintain the homogeneity of the nation it seeks to represent, in other words, to support the nationalism of the nation-state.” See Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia Univeristy Press, 2012), 121. For more on racial inequalities in Israel, see Smadar Lavie, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture, First edition (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014). The Yishuv was largely a project dominated by the Ashkenazi elite from Europe. Mizrahi/Sephardic Jews, in turn, have always been marginalized in and by the Israeli state. Prior to 1948, they were recruited as a racialized labor force by Ashkenazi Jews. After Israel’s declaration of independence, many were forced to flee their homes in Arab states. Today, although the Mizrahim make up the majority of the population, they are underrepresented in government, white-collar employment, and higher education. It is also important to note that Prime Minister Begin and the right-wing Likud party’s rise to power was in part made possible by appeals to working-class Mizrahi Jews. 76 Consular Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Viet Nam, “Vietnamese Diaspora,” in Review of Vietnamese Migration Abroad (Hanoi, 2012), 29.

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77 Bernard Punzalan, “2010 Chamorro Population,” Hale’ Taotao Haya, ChamorroRoots.com, Genealogy Project, March 2, 2015, https://www.chamorroroots.com/v7/index.php/9-taotao- tano/149-2010-chamorro-population. 78 Ma’an Staff, “Bureau: Majority of Palestinians Live in Diaspora,” Ma’an News Agency, May 13, 2015, https://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=765378. 79 Note that this refers to Chamorros and Palestinians, and not the Vietnamese diasporics. 80 Michel Foucault, Power/Knoweldge: Selected Interview and Other Writings by Michel Foucault, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 68; quoted in Alison Mountz, “Political Geography II: Islands and Archipelagos,” Progress in Human Geography 39, no. 5 (2015): 639. 81 Quoted in Frank Jacobs, “Palestine, the Island Paradise,” 2017, accessed 28 Feb. 2018, http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/370-palestines-island-paradise-now-with-a-word-from-its- creator. 82 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 83 This concept of “sourcings” is drawn from Craig Santos Perez. See for example Craig Santos Perez, From Unincorporated Territory [Guma’] (Richmond, California: Omnidawn Publishing, 2014), 85. 84 In addition to the texts listed in this paragraph, see also Mountz, “Political Geography II: Islands and Archipelagos”; Paul Amar, The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). 85 Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 297. 86 Michel Foucault, “Questions on Geography,” in Power/Knoweldge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 70. Originally published in Hérodote 1, no. 4 (1976) under the title “Questions à Michel Foucault sur la géographie.” 87 Lanny Thompson, Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories under U.S. Dominion after 1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2010). 88 Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens, eds., Archipelagic American Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). 89 Dean Itsuji Saranillio, “Why Asian Settler Colonialism Matters: A Thought Piece on Critiques, Debates, and Indigenous Difference,” Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3–4 (2013): 280–94. 90 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409. 91 Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xxxv. 92 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 1. 93 Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 19; Yu-ting Huang, “Between Sovereignties: Chinese Minor Settler Literature Across the Pacific” (UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015), ii. 94 Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein, “Introduction: On Colonial Unknowing,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016): Web; Lynne Horiuchi, “Spatial Jurisdiction, Historical Topographies, and Sovereignty at the Leupp Isolation Center,” Amerasia Journal 42, no. 1 (2016): 82–102; Karen J. Leong and Myla Vicenti Carpio, “Carceral Subjugations: Gila River Indian Community and Incarceration of Japanese Americans on Its Lands,” Amerasia

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Journal 42, no. 1 (2016): 103–20; Wendi Yamashita, “The Colonial and the Carceral: Building Relationships Between Japanese Americans and Indigenous Groups in the Owens Valley,” Amerasia Journal 42, no. 1 (2016): 121–40; Juliana Hu Pegues, “‘Picture Man’: Shoki Kayamori and the Photography of Colonial Encounter in Alaska, 1912-1941,” College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 41, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 90–118; Juliana Hu Pegues, “Rethinking Relations: Interracial Intimacies of Asian Men and Native Women in Alaskan Canneries,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 15, no. 1 (March 2013): 55–66; Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’i (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008); Dean Itsuji Saranillio, “Colliding Histories: Hawai’i Statehood at the Intersections of Asians ‘Ineligible to Citizenship’ and Hawaiians ‘Unfit for Self-Government’’,’” Journal of Asian American Studies 13, no. 3 (October 2010): 283–309; Dean Itsuji Saranillio, “Kēwaikaliko’s Benocide: Reversing the Imperial Gaze of Rice v. Cayetano and Its Legal Progeny,” American Quarterly 62, no. 3 (September 2010): 457–76; Alfred Peredo Flores, “‘No Walk in the Park’: US Empire and the Racialization of Civilian Military Labor in Guam, 1944– 1962,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2015): 813–35; Diaz, “Bye Bye Ms. American Pie”; Lisa Kahaleole Hall, “Which of These Things Is Not Like the Other: Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders Are Not Asian Americans, and All Pacific Islanders Are Not Hawaiian,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2015): 727–47; Sunaina Maira and Magid Shihade, “Meeting Asian/Arab Studies: Thinking Race, Empire, and Zionism in the U.S.,” Journal of Asian American Studies 9, no. 2 (2006): 117–40; Junaid Rana and Diane C. Fujino, “Taking Risks, Or The Question of Palestine Solidarity and Asian American Studies,” American Quarterly 67, no. 4 (2015): 1027– 37; Juliana Hu Pegues, “Empire, Race, and Settler Colonialism: BDS and Contingent Solidarities,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016): Web; Candace Fujikane, “Against the Yellowwashing of Israel: The BDS Movement and Liberatory Solidarities across Settler States,” in Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, ed. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 150–71; Robert Diaz, “Queer Unsettlements: Diasporic Filipinos in Canada’s World Pride,” Journal of Asian American Studies 19, no. 3 (October 2016): 327–50; Michael Connors Jackman and Nishant Upadhyay, “Pinkwatching Israel, Whitewashing Canada: Queer (Settler) Politics and Indigenous Colonization in Canada,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 42, no. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 2014): 195–210. 95 Referring to Jewish refugees who settled Palestine, Patrick Wolfe asserts that “there is no necessary tension between being a refugee and being a settler.” See Wolfe, “Purchase by Other Means,” 203. 96 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 134. 97 Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Yến Lê Espiritu, “Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in US Scholarship,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, no. 1–2 (2006): 410–33. 98 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 2; Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 243–58; Neda Atanasoski, Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 2–3.

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99 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 262. 100 Nguyen, “Nước/Water,” 66; See also Patricia Nguyễn, “Salt | Water : Vietnamese Refugee Passages, Memory, and Statelessness at Sea,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 45, no. 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2017): 94–111. 101 See Derrida’s concept of “différance” in Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988). 102 See for example, Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational history: The Past, Present, and Future (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 103 Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, trans. Ahdaf Soueif, First Anchor Books Edition (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 41. 104 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,” Media, Culture, and Society 2 (1980): 68–69. 105 Yến Lê Espiritu defines “critical juxtaposing” as the “bringing together of seemingly different and disconnected events, communities, histories, and spaces in order to illuminate what would otherwise not be visible about the contours, contents, and afterlives of war and empire.” See Yến Lê Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 21.

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Part I: Uncovering Sourcings: Alternative Genealogies and Diasporic Histories

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Chapter 1: Homebase or Promised Land: Establishing Guam and Israel-Palestine’s Influence on Asian American Political Subjectivity

“But how can anything have nothing to do with race?”1 Such quips Seth, one of the main characters in Gish Jen’s 1996 novel, Mona in the Promised Land, about two thirds of the way into the book. Seth’s incredulous tone indexes the increasing role that race began to play in shaping American social consciousness during the late 1960s: a period marked by the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, the American Indian Movement, the Vietnam War, Third World Marxism, and the fight for ethnic studies on college campuses.2 Concurrent with these anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist struggles, the Asian American Movement erupted, as different ethnic Americans whose parents and grandparents had immigrated from Asia articulated a distinct racial consciousness and coalitional political identity. What is less known however is how Guam and Israel-Palestine—as spaces, rhetorical signifiers, and decolonial struggles—shaped the racial politics of this period. This chapter analyzes two canonical Asian American novels, Shawn Wong’s Homebase (1979) and Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land (1996), which illuminate the occluded role of Guam and Israel-Palestine respectively in shaping the racial politics of the late 1960s. These readings present an alternative, archipelagic genealogy of the Asian American Movement: one that acknowledges the role of anti-Vietnam War activism, Global Maoism, and contemporaneous racial justice movements in encouraging the coalescence of diverse immigrant ethnic groups into a coalitional political identity, but that also insists on the foundational importance of U.S. settler militarism in Guam, and American support of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine, in shaping the emergence of an Asian American racial politics.3 Rather than reproduce perceived disciplinary-based tensions in Asian American studies between “a literature-based cultural studies and a history-based one”—that is, between a high theory mode of critique and deconstruction and grounded praxis of sociology and activism—this chapter investigates, to quote Colleen Lye, the “role of literature as a practical site” of the Asian American Movement’s “historical memory.”4 Literature, here, is a site of historic rupture: what Walter Benjamin identified as “an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized.”5 Although the field of Asian American studies has witnessed a recent proliferation of interest and attention to important questions of Asian American settler colonialism and settler militarism—and by extension to Israel-Palestine and Guam—I posit that Asian American political subjectivity has actually grappled with these concerns since its inception in the late 1960s-1970s, and by extension projected these concerns back onto earlier decades of Asian American un- incorporation. This genealogy has merely been overwritten by the field’s subsequent concern with questions of immigration, assimilation, and the model minority myth that dominated the scholarship of the 1980-90s.6 Even in Mona in the Promised Land, published in 1996, the issue of settler colonialism raised by the negotiation of Israel-Palestine is not addressed directly, due to the profusion of other Asian Americanist concerns regarding domestic racism and exclusion. Whereas subsequent narrations of the Asian American Movement elide the role of Guam and Israel-Palestine in shaping Asian American political subjectivity during the late 1960s, my readings of Homebase and Mona in the Promised Land uncover the occluded historical memory of these spaces’ influence, demonstrating how Guam and Israel-Palestine continue to shape the racial politics of the present in seemingly contradictory ways. On one hand, an Asian American subjectivity articulated through explicitly cultural nationalist claims to the American landscape,

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in defiance of domestic policies of racial exclusion, has the potential to reproduce structures of American exceptionalism, militarism, and settler colonialism. On the other hand, working through and with these contradictions, rather than ignoring or collapsing them, can lead to a more robust Asian Americanist critique of U.S. military empire.7 Such a shift in the geography of Asian American political formation necessitates a parallel shift in periodization.8 Scholars typically identify 1968 as a turning point in leftist racial politics in general, and Asian American racial consciousness in particular. For example, activist historian Max Elbaum opens Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che with a tribute to 1968: “During the first four months of 1968, the Vietnamese Tet offensive ended Washington’s hopes of victory in Southeast Asia, incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson was forced to abandon his re-election bid, Martin Luther King [Jr.] was assassinated, and Black rebellions erupted in more than 100 cities.”9 In his signature monograph Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America, cultural historian Daryl J. Maeda also emphasizes 1968, underscoring that the Third World Liberation Strike, “the longest student strike in U.S. history,” began that year.10 Karen Tei Yamashita’s groundbreaking I Hotel, a behemoth literary tribute to a decade of Asian American activism in the Bay Area, likewise commences with 1968. However, such a narration of 1968 as conception date for Asian American politics elides the importance of two earlier dates: 1950, the year an Organic Act cemented Guam’s status as an unincorporated, organized territory of the United States, and 1967, the year Israel initiated its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (as well as the Sinai Peninsula, which it later rescinded, and the Golan Heights, the western portion of which remains occupied) following the Six Day War. 1967 marks a turning point in increased U.S. support of Israeli settler colonialism, which in turn stretches back to the Zionist foundation of the state in 1948, and earlier decades on property accumulation and Palestinian dispossession.11 Backdating the periodization of the Asian American Movement acknowledges the importance of these earlier dates in shaping an emergent Asian American racial and political consciousness. Given the historic importance of 1968 for American racial politics, it is no surprise that Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land, a novel about Asian American identity formation, begins in 1968. Unlike most narratives of the Asian American Movement which are situated on the West Coast, however, this novel takes place in the Jewish-majority suburb of Scarshill, New York, where the “blushing dawn of ethnic awareness has yet to pink up [the] inky suburban night.”12 Backdating the formation of Asian American political subjectivity requires a parallel move of expanding the archipelagic cartography of political significance, to include not only the settler colonial questions raised by Guam and Israel-Palestine but also Asian American racial formation on the East Coast. Furthermore, Jen’s description of the significance of 1968 highlights the previous year’s Six Day War, following which “the Jews have become The Jews,” on the novel’s very opening page. Here, Jewish identity is defined not only through religion, culture, external racialization, or biological descent, but also through a particular relationship to the recently established State of Israel. The politics of Israel-Palestine—and America’s own entanglement in Israeli occupation of Palestine, particularly post-1967—frames the novel from the very beginning, highlighting the importance of this war in shaping the domestic racial politics of the period.13 “Purely comic” in tone, its ironic critical distance masked by deceptively open and naive prose narrated in the third-person-limited point of view, Mona in the Promised Land charts the coming-of-age story of the titular character, Mona Chang, becoming Jewish in Scarshill during the turbulent period of the late 1960s.14 I use the phrase “becoming Jewish” deliberately—rather

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than “converting to Judaism”—to index the ambiguous racial nature of Jewish identity: is it ethnic or religious, biological or chosen? Such questions are explicitly discussed in the book, and have preoccupied much secondary literature surrounding the text.15 Furthermore Mona is often read as a foil to her older sister, Callie Chang, who in becoming Asian American, follows the more familiar development of racial consciousness ascribed to second-generation immigrants during this time period. Rather than naturalize or biologize Callie’s becoming, however, the novel reminds us of the constructed and historically emergent nature of an Asian American identity, going so far as to mark it as even more improbable and unbelievable than Mona’s own seemingly outlandish process of becoming Jewish, from the perspective of the sisters’ first- generation parents: [Callie] says she’s proud to be Asian American, that’s why she’s using her Chinese name. (Her original name, she calls it.) But what in the world is an Asian American? That’s what Ralph and Helen [her parents] want to know. And how can she lump herself together with the Japanese? The Japanese Americans, insists Callie/Kailan. After what they did during the war! complain Ralph and Helen. And what, friends with the Koreans too? And the Indians? The parents shake their heads. Better to turn Jewish than Asian American, that’s their opinion these days. At least Jews don’t walk around with their midriffs showing!16 The pan-ethnic Asian American identity that emerged during the late 1960s—one that attempted to sublate both ethnic differences and inherited histories of imperialism between warring Asian states—was not a biological or historical given, and indeed came as a surprise to first-generation immigrants, who understood their positionalities to be limited to a choice between identifying with the home country, and assimilating into white American culture.17 Mona and Callie’s processes of becoming expand the range of possible choices for Asian immigrants and their descendants. At first blush, the novel seems to present a dichotomy between Mona and Callie, given Mona’s absorption of Jewish American cultural memory, tradition, and sociality, versus Callie’s increasing interest in her Chinese roots via a politicization by her enlightened Black roommate at Yale, Naomi. While Mona goes to Temple and reads the Torah, Callie practices tai chi and wears padded Chinese jackets. One might presume then that Mona becomes Jewish, at the expense of becoming Asian American. As an Asian Americanist critique reminds us, though, Asian American identity—and as the novel explores, Jewish identity as well—is rooted in an unstable signifier, and its very unifying factor is its very power of deconstruction.18 Furthermore, just as Asian American literature is defined by form and not just by content—meaning “Asian Americanness is a property of the text itself rather than a property of the frame within which readers locate specific ethnic texts”—Asian American subjectivity too exceeds ethnic and racial markers such as language acquisition and cultural heritage.19 Indeed, if we define Asian American subjectivity by a particular subversive or deconstructive racial politics, by the novel’s epilogue, Mona has become just as, if not more so, “Asian American” than her sister Callie, who after attending an Ivy league school becomes a pediatrician and leads “a straight A life, what with the two beautiful children and big-success husband, and the single- family house with double-dug flower beds.”20 In contrast, Mona extends the countercultural markers of the late 1960s into the ‘70s and ‘80s, bearing a child out of wedlock, wishing at times for a female partner (if only to share the household responsibilities), and changing her name upon marriage to her Jewish American friend Seth to “Changowitz.”21 Mona’s radical name change suggests not only the emergence of postmodern, fluid identities, as the secondary literature has been quick to praise, but also a particular passage to Asian American subjectivity

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routed through Jewish culture, tradition, and politics.22 How much this Jewish subjectivity in turn is informed by the 1967 Six Day War, and Israel’s Zionist occupation of Palestine, is something that Mona as a character, and Asian Americans as political subjects, must further interrogate, however, insofar as Asian American politics takes a firm anti-imperial and anti- colonial stance. My reading explores the relationship between Asian American subject formation and Israeli state formation via overlapping and sometimes conflicting processes of identification and disidentification, articulated and disarticulated through Jewish American subject formation in the late 1960s.23 In contrast to Mona in the Promised Land, written about the late 1960s from the critical distance of the 1990s, Shawn Wong’s Homebase was written during the late 1960s’ roiling anti- Vietnam War protests, the Third World Liberation Front’s fight for ethnic studies at San Francisco State College and UC Berkeley, and the emergence of a self-articulated Asian American political and literary consciousness. Characterized by literary critic Hsuan L. Hsu as a “foundational Asian American text,” Homebase reproduces many of the themes now associated with early Asian American literature and politics: a struggle with whiteness, an anxiety around establishing roots in the U.S. in the face of political and cultural exclusion, and an unacknowledged complicity with U.S. settler colonialism.24 The novel chronicles Chinese American Rainsford Chan’s quest to find a home in America, circumscribed primarily to the continental American West.25 In it Guam plays a deceptively understated and subsequently under-analyzed role. Re-centering the main character Rainsford Chan’s seemingly peripheral relationship to 1950s Guam, however, shifts both the geographical and political coordinates of the emergence of Asian American identity and activism. Homebase is a non-linear poetic novel divided into six chapters that charts the quest of Rainsford Chan, a fourth generation Chinese American, to locate and establish roots in America, given the vexed history of legal exclusion, but in reality unincorporated inclusion—to mirror Guam’s paradoxical political status—of his forefathers: a great-grandfather who built the Central Pacific Railroad but was forced to return to China, a grandfather who snuck through Angel Island using the fabricated papers of other Chinese sons, and a father who performed American citizenship through his work as a military engineer. By “unincorporated inclusion,” I mean here to index the absorption and exploitation of Chinese labor that co-existed with the legal and cultural exclusion, that is un-incorporation, of Chinese (American) people. In Rainsford’s words: “I have no place in America, after four generations there is nothing except what America tells me about the pride of being foreign.”26 A contemporary of Frank Chin, Jeffery Chan, and Lawson Inada, Shawn Wong is one of the founders of “Asian American literature,” self-articulated as such. From early on however Homebase has been overshadowed by contemporaneous texts such as Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman (1972); Aiiieeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974), co- edited by Wong with Chin, Chan, and Inada; as well as Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976). I focus here on an under-studied part of an already overshadowed book: the surprisingly prominent depiction of Guam, an unincorporated territory, as foundational to Rainsford’s self-proclaimed incorporation into America as a Chinese American.27 Rainsford was born in 1950, the same year as the Guam Organic Act.28 Although he spends just one year on Guam—1956, six years after the Act’s passage—in his self-narration Rainsford compulsively returns to Guam as an origin of sorts, since it is the first place of which he retains any significant childhood memories as well as the last place he spends with his father before his father’s premature death in 1957.29 Indeed, given that Homebase is largely autobiographical, drawing

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from the author’s experiences of losing his father at age seven and being orphaned at age fifteen, it is significant that Guam is included in the text at all, as the author Wong did not move to Guam as a child himself.30 How then do we make sense of this deliberate inclusion of Guam—or rather unincorporated inclusion, given Guam’s glaring absence from the novel’s conclusion as well as its relative lack of recognition in the corresponding secondary literature—into Homebase? Likewise, although Gish Jen is a central author to Asian American literary studies, her prequel Typical American (1991) is much more likely to appear on Asian American syllabi than the later Mona in the Promised Land, which in turn is more likely to appear on Jewish studies syllabi than be included in Asian American literature courses.31 We could mark Mona in the Promise Land’s canonical status, then, as one too of unincorporated inclusion. Indeed, unincorporated inclusion presents a fitting analytic for understanding the role of Guam and Israel-Palestine in these two novels, and in the historic Asian American Movement more broadly. In these texts, Guam and Israel-Palestine are sites that haunt the character dialogue and plot without ever being fully incorporated into the main characters’ Asian American subjectivity. That is, Guam and Israel- Palestine function as sites of anxiety and disrupture that help reveal the contradictions of Asian American political subjectivity: the fight for inclusion within the U.S. state versus a critique of U.S. military empire and settler colonialism. Attending to the subsequently occluded importance of these two sites in shaping the emergent Asian American politics of the late 1960s re- establishes, I argue, the foundational importance of anti-settler colonial critique to Asian American political subjectivity.

Asian American Subjectivity and the Specter of Guam: Negotiating Homebase In Shawn Wong’s Homebase, the main character Rainsford Chan’s preoccupation with articulating his rootedness in America unwittingly reproduces the material genocide and rhetorical erasure of Indigenous peoples, both on the U.S. mainland and on Guam. Halfway through the novel, for example, he declares: “I chose the land around me, my grandfather’s America, to give me some meaning and place here, to build something around me, to establish my tradition.”32 Such preoccupation is compelled by his forefathers’ uprootedness, their unincorporated inclusion into America as a transitory, transpacific labor force. Determined to counteract such a history, Wong compulsively ties name to place: “I want to give all the moments of my life the names of places I have been to before, categorize them so that I can lift them out of my memory, find the steady pulse of my life. Root down my life into the names of places.”33 Such melancholic compulsivity is structured by his own foundational loss: Rainsford is named after his great-grandfather’s town, a town in the Sierra Nevada mountain range of California that no longer exists due to the historical expulsion of Chinese laborers—a literal erasure of Chinese subjectivity from the American landscape.34 Rainsford ends the novel with a long list of American place names—“Clipper Gap, Auburn, Newcastle, Penrhyn, Piño, Rocklin, Junction, Antelope, Arcade, and Sacramento, ninety miles from San Francisco . . . Davisville, Tremont, Dixon, Batavia, Elmira, Fairfield, Army Point, Benecia, Port Costa, Valona, Vallejo Junction, Tormey, Pinole, Sobrante, San Pablo, and Oakland . . . Aquatic Park in Berkeley”— and the declaration that “I have memorized all these towns and stations. Each town is a day in a journal, an entry in a diary, a letter, or a prayer”: a personal archive of sorts to ward off historical erasure.35 Guam is not explicitly mentioned in this final list of formative places, which reference mostly small towns in Northern California. Guam is arguably gestured towards, however. First,

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five out of twenty-seven—almost one fifth—of the places listed above are “unincorporated communities,” alluding to Guam via the island’s own status as an unincorporated territory. 36 Second, the text indexes a slippage between “Penhyrn,” a small island in the Pacific Ocean, and “Penryn,” a small town in Northern California; while context would suggest the appropriateness of the latter, the text actually references the former. Rather than write off this switch as a typo, I posit that it evidences the subtle but deliberate inclusion of a place that shifts our geographical focus to the Pacific. The above example is but one demonstration of Guam’s uneven, unincorporated inclusion into the novel—a formal representation of Asian Americans’ own uneven, unincorporated inclusion into the United States. I suggest however that Guam is foundational to Homebase’s articulation of Asian American subjectivity in multiple respects. First, as mentioned above, Guam is the birthplace of Rainsford’s memory—memory here being indispensable to the self-narration of one’s personal history: “On Guam, my world was a boy’s paradise and I remember all of it and its memory is constant.”37 Memories of exclusion, discrimination, and war were instrumental in shaping an Asian American political subjectivity in the late 1960s. Wong’s formal establishment of Guam as the origin of Rainsford’s memory emphasizes the territory’s foundational role in Asian Americanist political critique. Second, given that Rainsford’s father dies on Guam, Guam shapes Rainsford’s identity as a fatherless son—a subject position through which he comes to identify with his forefathers: “My great-grandfather had begun a tradition of orphaned men in this country and now I realized I was the direct descendent of that original fatherless and motherless immigrant. Now there was a direct line from the first generation to the fourth generation.”38 Orphan refers here to both the literal severance from one’s parents, as well as the severance from one’s mother/father-land, China: “I was not hampered by the knowledge of China as home.”39 For early masculinist Asian American writers such as Shawn Wong and Frank Chin—in contrast to say Maxine Hong Kingston, whom Chin derided—this severance from the Asian homeland was critical for the construction of a distinct Asian American identity that could lay claim to America, one that according to literary scholar Sau-Ling Wong was explicitly “non-Christian, nonfeminine, and nonimmigrant.”40 Severance of diasporic ties, however, was only the first step in embracing an American cultural identity, which brings us to the third point: Guam is foundational to Rainsford’s induction into American patriotism—“In 1956 my father taught me to sing ‘Home on the Range’ on that island in the Pacific Ocean. Standing there in the heat of an ocean lagoon, I sang out for my father about our home on the range and my friends the buffalo and the antelope.”41 Perhaps because of the long history of Chinese exclusion, it is only outside of the continental American west, outside the “Range,” that a Chinese American father and son can proudly claim to be, indeed, “Home on the Range.” Such a nationalist claim to belonging produces ambiguous politics. On one hand, claiming “Home on the Range” on Guam highlights rather than obfuscates America’s racist policies of Chinese exclusion, emphasizing the fact that Chinese Americans like Rainsford and his father must turn to unincorporated territories like Guam to feel, finally, at home. On the other hand, such a declaration also reproduces an American territorial claim over the island of Guam: by claiming Guam as a home for Chinese Americans, Rainsford and his father attempt to forcefully incorporate Guam into the American narrative of Manifest Destiny and settler colonialism, without any consultation with the indigenous population of Chamorros. Their home-making practices, therefore, here take on the valence of militarized settler colonialism.

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Indeed, the very song “Home on the Range” has settler colonial origins. It was originally published in 1872 as a poem entitled “My Western Home” by Dr. Brewster M. Higley, an otolaryngologist who moved to Smith County, Kansas in the wake of President Lincoln’s Homestead Act of 1862, which encouraged migration out to the American West by providing American settlers 160 acres of “public” (that is, Indigenous) land.42 Later adopted to music by Higley’s friend Daniel E. Kelley and formally arranged as sheet music by Texas composer David W. Guion in 1925, the song became the official state song of Kansas in 1947.43 The song, furthermore, has explicitly settler colonial lyrics. One stanza in particular stands out for representing Indigenous genocide and displacement: “The Red man was pressed from this part of the west,/ He’s likely no more to return,/ To the banks of the Red River where seldom if ever/ Their flickering campfires burn.”44 By locating “Home on the Range” in Guam, the novel draws attention to the extension to U.S. militarism and Manifest Destiny narratives across the Pacific, into island territories, highlighting the ways in which Native American genocide and displacement on the continental United States was and continues to be reproduced against Chamorros on Guam. Such settler practices on Guam, however, ironically produce a critical view of America: one attendant to the foundational role of U.S. militarism to American exceptionalism, and by extension, Asian American subjectivity insofar as this subjectivity is articulated as a nationalist claim to the American landscape. It is on Guam—an organized but unincorporated territory— and importantly not the U.S. mainland that Rainsford comes to truly know America: I knew America by living away from it. I caught glimpses of it from Guam, that tropical, white, sandy piece of America. I lived it every day, every minute of the day. I saw what other boys in America saw, and I saw things they only imagined. The bombers, the fighters, the aircraft carriers, the submarines, and every time a ship or the air base had an open house my father took me.45 Here, Guam’s contradictory unincorporated status is exposed: Guam is simultaneously a “piece of America” as well as “away from it,” a double movement that suggest the fluidity of nước, of water and waves. Furthermore, such a contradictory status affords a privileged perspective. Rainsford sees things that others in America cannot see, things they “only imagined”: “[t]he bombers, the fighters, the aircraft carriers, the submarines” left over from World War II—in other words, the military infrastructure upon which America is built, and that was foundational to America’s westward expansion across the U.S. mainland, across the Pacific, into colonized islands such as Guam, and out towards Asia, in an attempt to curb the imperial influence of superpowers such as Japan and China.46 Guam provides therefore a space of critical distance for visualizing U.S. military empire. Ironically, however, in seeking to claim Guam as a home for Chinese Americans, Rainsford seeks to collapse that distance by incorporating Guam into the fold of U.S. empire, unwittingly reproducing structures of settler colonialism, despite his minoritarian position with American society: what Yu-ting Huang has identified as “minor settler” colonialism.47 He seeks to re-populate the “empty tropical paradise” of Guam— a settler colonial terra nullius fantasy propagated by songs like “Home on the Range”—with a host of military infrastructure. Rainsford ultimately is unsatisfied with claiming home (on the range) in Guam, and seeks to assert belonging in the continental American West as well. But what are the settler colonial implications of Rainsford’s triumphant claiming of place in America, as a historically excluded Chinese American? Following Rainsford’s final list of place names, mentioned above, Rainsford literally appropriates Native American subjectivity in order to claim a prehistoric attachment to

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the American West, concluding the novel with this soliloquy that he “sang, prayed, and wrote”: “‘We are old enough to haunt this land like an Indian who laid down to rest and his body became the outline of the horizon. This is my father’s canyon. See his head reclining! That peak is his nose, that cliff his chin, and his folded arms are summits.’”48 Literary scholar Catherine Fung generously interprets this “act of transubstantiation” as an articulation of “Asian-American affinity with Native American historical memory” in what she calls a “moment of mimetic dynamism,” positing the potential to produce a “cross-racial critique of US empire,” despite the ways in which this “strategy of writing oneself into the American landscape” risks rendering “Native Americans’ claim to land invisible.”49 In order to be avoided, such risks must be explicitly acknowledged. Otherwise, as Hsuan L. Hsu has noted, Rainsford lays “claim to the US West as his ‘Home on Range’” by ventriloquizing American exceptionalism via a particular “Chinese American exceptionalism.”50 That is, Rainsford escapes his subjection to violent historical erasure by imposing that erasure upon others and “forgetting his complicity” in the settler colonial genocide of Native Americans on the U.S. mainland.51 Having taken the erasure of Native Americans as a given—“an Indian who laid down to rest”—Rainsford projects his own Chinese patriarch onto the land—“This is my father’s canyon. See his head reclining!”— bypassing, in effect, the Native American subject as living as resilient in order to articulate a direct relationship between his Chinese forefathers and the American landscape.52 Indigenous Chamorros are doubly erased in the closing lines of the novel. Like Native Americans, they are overwritten by a triumphant narrative of a Chinese American claiming of space in America. But whereas the Native American “Indian” is at least explicitly invoked in this passage, if only to then be overlaid, Chamorros are notably absent from this passage, as well as from the entire novel.53 To understand the particular dynamic of settler colonialism on Guam, however, we need to also address the “mutually-constitutive dynamic” of U.S. militarism via Juliet Nebolon’s concept of “settler militarism,” attending to seminal role of the U.S. military in the appropriation and continual occupation of indigenous Chamorro land.54 Rather than advance a unilateral critique of Rainsford’s settler colonial affinities, I want to attend to the centrality of U.S. militarism to the particular Asian American subjectivity that this foundational Asian American text depicts. This shift from settler colonialism to settler militarism also shifts our geographical focus from the continental U.S. to the Pacific.55 Guam, which as shown above is indispensable to the development of Rainsford’s Asian American consciousness, is described in Homebase as a “world of real aircraft carriers, destroyers, submarines, bombers, sunken ships, and palm-lined white sandy beaches.”56 In the novel, Rainsford’s Chinese American father literally gives his life to the U.S. military in order to prove he is worthy of U.S. citizenship, cognizant as he is of his own forefathers’ exclusion from the nation. But at what price? As an engineer, Rainsford’s father works on military equipment used in America’s Cold War imperialist ventures into Asia, such as the recently concluded Korean War and the looming Vietnam War. Asian American home-making in America is thus predicated on a violent disidentification with Asia and Asian decolonial struggles, as well as a severance of diasporic histories and familial connections.57 Instead, Rainsford replaces his disavowed Asian ancestors with militarized weaponry, earnestly yet perversely identifying them as his intimate friends and family: “I remember those bombers like friends. My father took pictures of them for the family album. The B-47s made a lot of noise with their jet engines, and I always like to see them land and their chutes pop out of their tails.”58 It is this re-centering of U.S. militarism, and not just settler colonialism, that can also help us unpack the title of Wong’s novel, Homebase—a surprisingly under-theorized point in the secondary literature surrounding

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the text. Home for Asian Americans, I argue, always already risks becoming a Homebase. From the militarized policing of borders and racial exclusion of Chinese laborers during the nineteenth century; to the military’s interpellation of Japanese Americans as war enemies during World War II; to U.S. wars in the Pacific during the twentieth century; to the profusion of U.S. military bases in South Korea, Okinawa, the Philippines, Bikini Atoll, Hawai’i, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam; to the processing of Southeast Asian refugees on U.S. military bases following the Vietnam War—“home,” the act of claiming space within America, risks instrumental militarization. The U.S. military base—and by extension U.S. militarism—cannot be separated from Asian American home-making practices: the practice of claiming a “Home on the Range.”59 A truly anti-colonial and anti-imperialist Asian American politics, therefore, must disidentify with these processes of militarism by acknowledging Asian American complicity in structures of settler colonialism and settler militarism and working to dismantle them. If the reader disassociates the narrator from the author, the surface plot from the subtext, then Homebase does not only uphold and reproduce settler colonialism and settler militarism, but rather offers a forceful critique of a particular Asian American subjectivity that is enunciated through these racist structures. Because “Home on the Range” is always already militarized, an Asian American subjectivity and settlement that severs its diasporic relationship to Asia in favor of militarized intimacy, disregarding indigenous claims to the land, is also always already fraught with violence against both Asian Americans and Indigenous peoples. As this novel bears witness, such critiques have grounded Asian American politics since its emergence in the late 1960s, despite these themes’ under-appreciation in subsequent scholarship. Pan-ethnic Asian American literature, and as well as Asian American studies more broadly, has been concerned with U.S. militarism since at least the late 1960s, as evidenced by the period’s virulent anti- Vietnam War protests.60 Although on the surface Homebase overtly articulates the problems of racist exclusion and assimilation—issues which have indeed preoccupied the field of Asian American studies—a re-reading of this foundational Asian American novel that privileges the central role of Guam uncovers instead a critique of U.S. empire in the Pacific as well as of Asian American settlement, insofar as this settlement does not attend to native claims to the land. In highlighting these dangerous pitfalls via the title, Homebase, the novel can be read as drawing critical attention to—indeed, perhaps satirizing—this militarized subjectivity, pointing the reader toward an alternative politics: an Asian American critique that acknowledges entanglement with U.S. imperialism, settler colonialism, and settler militarism, finding points of connection with other communities racialized by these structures.

Haunted by Palestine: Reading Mona in the Promised Land While Guam may play an understated role in Homebase, Palestine is all but invisible in Mona in the Promised Land. Yet it is a haunting presence, one that subconsciously shapes the characters’ development, dialogue, and budding racial consciousness. In the novel, the Chang family members negotiate their uneven incorporation into American society via absorption into the Jewish American community of Scarshill, New York. But what it means to assimilate into “Jewishness” is ambiguous, given the term’s capacious nature: according to the novel’s first page, Jewishness can signify both economic upward mobility as well as a particular relationship to Israel and its expansionist state formation, at the expense of Palestinian self-determination: For [the Changs are] the New Jews, after all, a model minority and Great American Success. They know they belong in the promised land.

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Or do they? In fact, it’s only 1968; the blushing dawn of ethnic awareness has yet to pink up their inky suburban night. They have an idea about the blacks because of poor Martin Luther King. More distantly perceived is that the Jews have become The Jews, on account of the Six Day War; much less that they, the Changs, are The New Jews.61 In other words: if the Changs are the “New Jews,” then who and what are the “Jews”? Even within these two paragraphs, Jen plays with capitalization to destabilize any fixed notion of Jewishness. The first paragraph reproduces stereotypes regarding Jewish financial prowess, mapping these qualities onto the upwardly-mobile Chinese American Chang family, whose move to Scarshill in pursuit of a zip code with one of the “top ten schools nationwide” presents a case of class advancement. But Jen uses capitalization to insert a humor-driven critical distance, too naïve in tone to qualify as satire, and yet equally incisive: “they’re the New Jews, after all, a model minority and Great American Success.” Capitalization here—“Great American Success”—distances rather than reproduces this narrative, a point underlined by the undermining question—“Or do they?”—in the next paragraph. Capitalization also marks the distinction between the first and second instantiation of Jewishness: “the Jews” signify financial and cultural success in America, while “The Jews” articulate a newfound politicization of American Jews “on account of the Six Day War,” and the subsequent move of this primarily liberal, anti-Vietnam War voting contingent to push for American interventionist defense of Israel in the Middle East—a move Judith Klinghoffer marks with the ironic term “Hoves and Dawks.”62 But even prior to this shift in signification in the second paragraph, the un-capitalization of “promised land” in the first paragraph previews the insertion of Israeli politics into domestic racial politics (Martin Luther King serving here as a metonymy). Capitalized, “Promised Land” refers to the Jewish people’s historic relationship to the Land of Israel (Ha’aretz Israel) and Temple Mount in Jerusalem. After centuries of forced exile, Zionist groups began to articulate a “return” to the Promised Land during the late nineteenth century—a movement that started as a form of secular anti-clericalism and only later took on religious connotations. Such return, however, disregarded the land claims on the indigenous Palestinian population, which had settled the land in the interim. Un-capitalized, “promised land” returns with what Derrida would call différance: the term used in reference to the Changs, as Chinese Americans with incomplete—or à la Guam and Wong’s Homebase, unincorporated—inheritance of America’s Manifest Destiny narrative, draws attention to the ludicrousness of an otherwise naturalized settler colonial narrative: that the New World was “promised” to the European settlers and their descendants, at the expense of the Native American populations; or by extension, that Israel was indeed “promised” to the Jews in any way that would preclude a native Palestinian’s right to the land.63 Building upon previous theorizations of Asians as the New Jews via similar patterns of assimilation into whiteness via educational and monetary achievement, as explored by Cathy Schlund-Vials, or Asians as the new threatening embodiment of abstract capitalism, replacing the Jews, as theorized by Iyko Day, I argue that Mona in the Promised Land defines Asian Americans as “The New Jews”—with a capital T—in order to index a particular positioning to Israel-Palestine via the Six Day War.64 Throughout the novel, Israel, and by extension the repressed figure of Palestine, haunts the characters’ discussions about domestic racial politics and different groups’ position in relation to whiteness: Are Jewish Americans white even if they are not WASPs? How do the Changs figure in the black-white binary? Israel-Palestine is addressed more explicitly in the middle of the novel, however, when Mona, her Jewish American boyfriend Seth, and her Jewish American best friend Barbara bond with Alfred, the African

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American, Black Power-advocating cook hired by Mona’s parents to work in their pancake house alongside the teenagers. In the following passage, Barbara grapples with the Zionist mandate of Israel, wondering how someone can claim a space that they have never visited as home, and querying whether claiming a Zionist identity mean forfeiting one’s claim to the United States. She also tries to draw an uneven parallel with Alfred’s own fraught relationship with Africa, the homeland of slavery’s descendants: People discuss Israel with more curiosity than animosity, even though they are vaguely pro-Arab. Meaning that what they mainly want to know is, Why do Jews live in the United States, if they already have a homeland? Barbara endeavors to explain among other things how there’s a war going on in the homeland, it’s not all apple pie. Also she’s not sure she’d want to actually move to the homeland, the Law of Return notwithstanding. “It’s like you could probably return to Africa if you wanted,” she says, poised on one corner of her crate. “But what about you friends and everything? Just because a place is your homeland doesn’t mean you feel at home there.”65 In this first sentence, Jen references the Palestinian struggle indirectly, via the position of those who are “vaguely pro-Arab.” Even though Jen’s character Barbara asserts that such discussions are marked more by curiosity than animosity, the acknowledgement of even a degree of animosity towards Israel admits the existence of a political position in favor of the Palestinian struggle for liberation. Such an admission undercuts the presumed ignorance about Palestinian nationalism—and Arab nationalism more broadly—that Barbara assumes in her insistence that indeed there is “a war going on in the homeland,” “war” here implying a degree of equal footing between Israeli armies and Palestinians refugees displaced into the surrounding Arab nations. Jen marks the latent anti-Semitism undergirding WASP sociality via the question “Why do Jews live in the United States, if they already have a homeland?”, which could be read as a desire to expel Jews from the U.S. However, such domestic anti-Semitism, though in need of denunciation, does not excuse Israeli expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians in the supposed Jewish “homeland.” Jen further draws critical attention to the untenable logics underpinning Israel’s Law of Return by drawing an uneven parallel with the presumed ability and desire for African Americans, as descendants of slaves, to return to their “home” in Africa: a historical and psychological impossibility, as discussed by theorists such as Saidiya Hartman.66 Indeed, Alfred pushes back against such a parallel, presenting two distinctions between the two cases. First, even if African Americans wouldn’t “feel at home” in Africa, they do not have the luxury to refuse such a passage, because “there ain’t no way whitey is ever going allow us no elbow room here” in America; on the other hand, the reason to stay in America is to “‘bring down whitey’s government. Black power!’”67 Put otherwise, whereas Jewish Americans can integrate smoothly into American society via a claim to whiteness, such pathways are foreclosed to African Americans such as Alfred and his friends. Barbara continues: “‘I don’t speak Hebrew. And there’s no Holocaust going on now, and I’m not on that ship the St. Louis, and this not the attic Anne Frank got stuck in. I think every Jew should visit Israel, and try a kibbutz, and make a donation. But does that mean everyone should live there?’”68 Here, Jen extends the critique of the Zionist rhetoric of Return, echoing Jewish diaspora studies scholars such as Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin who advocate the power of diasporic sensibility to critique the exclusionary logic of Zionism.69 However, in the novel, such a critique is predicated on Barbara’s ability to claim space in America, and her luxury to set

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aside or ignore America’s own history of settler colonialism and imperialism as accessory rather than foundational: “she explains that America is a great country if you forget about Vietnam and maybe some other details. Or at least it’s been great for the Jews. For once the Promised Land has turned out more or less as promised.” And here we return full circle to the beginning, and the play with capitalization of “P/promised L/land” to refer to both/either Israel and the United States: the “correct” signification of the former slipping contextually into the latter, born along by the un-capitalization of the second “promised.” Such slippage is also formally echoed by the novel’s title, Mona in the Promised Land: in the 1996 Vintage Contemporaries printing of the book, “promised land” remains un-capitalized on the book’s cover, but it contrarily appears in capitalized form on the inside title pages, again reproducing the slippage between Israel and the United States. Several pages after Barbara’s soliloquy about Israel, Jen uses humor and exaggeration to further highlight the logical inconsistencies of a leftist, anti-imperialist (read: anti-Vietnam War) attachment to Israel, distancing the author’s voice from that of the politically earnest yet naïve characters. In a discussion about “black independence,” and the teenagers’ plan to stand with Alfred in a workers’ dispute against Mona’s parents—“let the workers throw off their chains!”— Seth draws an (again, uneven) parallel between racial differences in America, and geographical/linguistic differences in the Jewish diaspora:70 [Seth] holds forth about Poland, land of his forebears, and how his mother’s father refused to learn Hebrew. Yiddish was the language of the workers, said this grandfather, who by the way was not in favor of Israel, either. For why should Israeli workers stand separate from Polish workers? There should be no nations whatsoever, that was his opinion. The oppressed should stand together. “You mean like us,” Mona says, and Barbara and Seth agree. Like us! They agree that they are one nation—no, nationless. However, pro-Israel.71 Here, Seth acknowledges a diasporic Jewish critique of Zionism, articulated by his grandfather, a political leftist who “was not in favor of Israel, either,” due to the Israeli state’s imperative to sublate diasporic Jewish difference via a homogenizing language of revitalized Hebrew—a move that in turn sublated political difference, erasing both the politics and language “of the workers” (an ironic move given Zionism’s purportedly socialist origins).72 However, this acknowledgment is quickly set aside in favor of the more noble-sounding, yet ahistorical platitude that the “oppressed should stand together.” That is, the radical, deterritorialized notion that “[t]here should be no nations whatsoever,” that the friends’ group should be “nationless,” is undercut by the following contradictory stance—“However, pro-Israel”—given Israel’s own complicated relationship to nationalism. On one hand, the State of Israel calls for a sublation of Jewish difference and diversity into a homogenous Jewish national identity—a call that could be mapped onto the insistence that the “oppressed should stand together” at all costs. On the other hand, Israel asks that its Jewish diasporics revoke their prior national attachments: hence the uneven equivalence between “one nation—no, nationless.” Such an assertion that the “oppressed should stand together” may indeed invoke a progressive politics in the domestic racial sphere: the unspoken parallel here is contemporaneous Asian American racial formation—a concern emphasized by the inclusion of Mona in the Promised Land in the Asian American literary canon—and the emergence of a radical racial politics in the late 1960-70s moment more broadly. However, this metaphor of racial solidarity translates imperfectly into the sociopolitical context of Israel-Palestine, where Jews retain the national majority. “Stand together” against whom? The State of Israel’s surface-

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level critique of national difference—insofar as this difference is united by a common denominator of Jewish identity—is predicated upon an intense nationalistic rejection of the ultimate Other, the non-Jewish figure of the Palestinian, who threatens the Zionists’ claim to the land. Overall, the inclusion of Israel into Mona and the Promised Land invokes the “historical memory” of Israel-Palestine’s influence on the domestic racial politics of this period. That is, the characters—and on a different level, the author—bring up Israel in order to shed light on domestic debates about the relationship between whites and Blacks, whites and Jews, whites and Asians, Jews and Asians, Asians and Blacks, and Jews and Blacks. In their insistence that “the oppressed should stand together,” Mona, Seth, and Barbara mean well: they genuinely want to help their friend and co-worker Alfred. However, such optimistic, surface-level politics fail to account for the specter of class and racial differences that must be accounted for in struggles for solidarity. Rather than subsume difference under a multicultural banner of aspirational coalition- building, one must work with and through its tensions. Indeed, when the teenagers offer to host a displaced Alfred in Barbara’s parents’ house, they end up retaining a paternalistic hold over Alfred and the experiment in racial solidarity ends badly, with Barbara accusing Alfred and his African American friends of theft and kicking them out, as is a landlord’s prerogative. The language and cultural signifiers of Jewishness are mapped not only onto Mona and the Changs, but also onto Alfred and his Black Power friends, again underlining the ambiguity and capaciousness of Jewishness as a signifier. In another exchange, before Alfred and his friends are kicked out of Barbara’s house, Alfred’s friend Ray identifies African Americans, as opposed to Jews who “still got to have Israel not matter what,” as the “chosen people,” here referenced in un-capitalized form:73 “But we are the chosen people, you know. You are the white devil, and your empire is falling apart.” “Do you really believe that?” says Mona. “The empire is falling apart,” says Ray. “But here we are, integrated,” says Evie. “Is it unnatural?” “I seen everything, man,” Ray shrugs. “This ain’t nothing compared to what went on in ‘Nam.”74 This passage is significant for several reasons. First, via the invocation of “chosen people,” the Jewish rhetoric of divine preference is here mapped onto the Black Power struggle against American racial oppression, as opposed to the Zionist project for a Jewish-dominated Israel, suggesting the moral superiority of the former over the latter. In “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin caution against the allegorizing the name “jew”—with a lower-case “j”—to refer to the “Other” writ large in the writing of Jean- François Lyotard in particular, and Western philosophy more generally.75 Instead, they argue for the importance of recognizing historical particularity, especially in the face of incommensurable political injustice. Although “chosen people” here risks the very allegorization that Boyarin and Boyarin critique, in this passage it functions not to conflate racial difference—the incommensurable historical experience of diasporic Jews and African Americans—but rather to call out the white supremacist underpinnings of Zionist rhetoric. Indeed, Boyarin and Boyarin’s insistence on genealogical particularly, rather than autochthony, as the grounds for Jewish identity, provides another critique of Zionism’s rhetoric of sublating ethnic difference (a rhetoric that remains a myth, it should be noted, given the continual racial segregation and inequality in Israel among Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Sephardic Jews).

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According to Ray, racial oppression is not only domestic, but also imperialistic—“your empire is falling apart”—implying the transnational reach of U.S. empire, and implicating U.S. foreign aid to Israel in support of its settler colonial project in Palestine. This passage critically juxtaposes Israel, the United States, and Vietnam, bringing to light the subsequently suppressed and forgotten connections between these three spaces marked by empire—a point elaborated in chapter two. In response to Evie’s quip that integration does happen at times, despite the racialization of African Americans as subjugated and white Americans as the “white devils” imposing such subjugation, Ray responds that this “unnatural” situation is “nothing compared” to the level of racial integration that “went on in ‘Nam.” Ray refers here to at least two forms of cross-racial intimacy: sexual relations between African American soldiers and Vietnamese women, as evidenced by the profusion of Afro-Amerasian children conceived during the war, as well as fraternal relations between American soldiers of different races, due to the army’s racial integration. Although the Vietnam War disproportionately drafted poor men and men of color, in the heat of battle, color was seemingly erased, as American men died alongside each other. In the passage above, Mona’s racial position also remains ambiguous: is she also a “white devil,” or part of the population subjugated by U.S. empire? Throughout Mona in the Promised Land, Mona’s negotiation of race and racial becoming develops in relation to not only Jewish Americans, but also African Americans. Indeed, Jewishness—manifested as class mobility, ease of assimilation into American culture, ability to ignore America’s history of settler colonialism and imperialism, and a stalwart if not sometimes politically contradictory support of Israel—is mapped onto whiteness in the novel. Whiteness in turn is articulated against blackness, a racialization contextualized by Martin Luther King Jr.’s fight for racial justice and the Civil Rights Movement that framed the novel’s opening pages. In this racialized black-white binary of the late 1960s, Mona is constantly forced to negotiate her positionality. In another example, Alfred marks the racial boundaries between himself and Mona, Barbara, and Seth, asking: “‘You know the difference between you white folk and me?’” Jen narrates: “He’s talking to Mona and Barbara and Seth, only two of whom are white; Mona thinks she should point this out./ But instead she says, ‘What?’”76 In this passage, Mona is interpellated as white, and though she internally expresses unease with the imposed racialization, she answers to the call. On the next page though, when Alfred again reproduces a black-white racial binary, Mona seems to resist interpellation as white: “White is white, man. Everything else is black. Half and half is black.” “Are you telling me I’m black?” Mona says. He looks at her, puzzled, then grins. “Are you pulling poor Alfred’s chain again?”77 Rather than work with and through Alfred’s puzzlement, Mona eases the tension with a joke, as is characteristic of Jen’s writing style: “Mona grins back, offering [Alfred] a beer. ‘Couldn’t help it,’ she says. ‘It was hanging right there.’”78 Such sidestepping of tension, however, functions not as a copout, but rather as a refusal to foreclose, to fix, Mona’s capacious racial becoming. Indeed, in Scarshill, New York in the late 1960s, Mona and the Changs occupy a fluid positionality on the black-white racial binary. For Mona’s parents however, this fluidity is articulated as instability: the risk of becoming Black: “there’s another reason her parents don’t want to have too much to do with blacks—namely, that they don’t want to turn into blacks.”79 In a society where Blackness is coded as criminal, downwardly mobile, and dependent on government handouts, Mona’s parents vehemently attempt to avoid such a racialization. In the words of Helen, Mona’s mother: “‘We are not Negroes. You hear me? Why should we work so hard—so people can talk to us about birth control for free?’”80 The work of the novel is not to

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unilaterally condemn such negative codings however, replacing them with more positive stereotypes, but rather to destabilize and unfix—or à la Stuart Hall, to “decode”—such fixed codings. Such unfixed codings risk reproducing negative stereotypes in unequal power dynamics—something the novel remains in tension, unresolved. Instead, throughout the novel Jen portrays with characteristic openness and humor the multiple significations of Black, white, Jewish, Asian, and Asian American in flux during the 1960s, during a historical moment of cohering racial formations.81 Furthermore, these racial categories are not only flexible, but also permeable, bleeding into and mapping onto one another. As mentioned in this chapter’s introduction, Mona and her sister Callie are often interpreted as foils of one another: the former becomes Jewish while the latter becomes Asian American. However, to become Jewish does not preclude Mona from becoming Asian American. In fact, Mona too is drawn to Callie’s sophisticated roommate Naomi, and seduced by Naomi’s articulation of a people of color—and more specifically a yellow, or Asian American—racial consciousness: In terms of white folk, for example. Naomi never says they’re out to get your ass, the way Alfred does. She talks about them in a gentler way that makes them seem involuntarily stuck to one another by special invisible but all-weather glue. This makes Mona and Callie and Naomi stuck together too, by virtue of their being colored folk. Mona has never thought of herself as colored before, though she knew herself not to be white. Yellow, says Naomi now. You are yellow. A yellow person, a yellow girl. It takes some time getting used to, this idea, especially since Mona’s summertime color is most definitely brown, and the rest of the year she is not exactly a textbook primary. But then Naomi is not black either; she claims to be closer in color to a paper bag. If she were a cabinet door or a shade of hair dye, people would have a name for her exact shade. But as she is only a person, she is called black, just as Mona and Callie are called yellow. And as yellow is a color, they are colored, which is how it is they are working together on the project.82 Class heterogeneities aside, this passage highlights the constructed nature of race and racial consciousness, simultaneously explaining that race is not only externally imposed, but also potentially chosen—chosen here inflected by the Jewish signification of “chosen people,” and the ambiguous agent of choice it implies. Indeed, race and racial consciousness can be politicized: Mona may simultaneously refuse America’s black-white binary and understand how Asian Americans—“yellow” people—fit into this binary, necessitating strategic alliances such as that articulated by the term “people of color.” Angela Davis, seminal woman of color activist and scholar, articulated this distinction as an “identity based on politics versus politics based on identity.”83 However, the permeability of racial subjectivity stretches further. Not only are racial categories overlapping; they can also be articulated with and through one another. Rabbi Horowitz once told Mona, the studious Jewish convert: “The more Jewish you become, the more Chinese you’ll be.”84 First, note the distinction between verb tenses here: to become Jewish, to adopt another racial subjectivity, does not preclude the capacity to be Chinese. In fact, it strengthens it, especially since “what it means to be Jewish,” as far as Mona can deduce by chapter three, “mostly seems to be about remembering that you are [Jewish]”—in other words, resisting total assimilation into white American culture, and remembering one’s diasporic history and traditions.85 In this instance, to adopt a Jewish sensibility is to resist cultural amnesia.

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In the passages above, Mona uneasily negotiates her racial subjectivity in relation to Jewishness, insofar as Jewishness is coded as whiteness and its attendant privileges in American society. However, the novel also offers different articulations of Jewishness: ones rooted in histories of generosity and social justice. For Mona, Asian American consciousness is not opposed to Jewish subjectivity; rather, it is routed through a Jewish tradition of political activism.86 As Mona’s friend Barbara explains: “[B]eing Jewish is also great because it’s about fighting for freedom. ‘We’re the original Freedom Riders. Just think if everyone in the world were Jewish, how much better off we would be.’”87 Jen is careful not to normatively supplant other significations of Jewishness with this one about fighting for freedom: Barbara’s comment after all is problematic, given how it undermines a long history of African American activism with a logic of originality, and how it alludes to Israel’s terra nullis fantasy of a land free of non- Jewish Palestinians. But the racial privileges of a Jewish American subjectivity are held in tension with an alternative Jewish genealogy: one of political activism and racial justice. At other points in the novel Barbara invokes the Jewish concept of mitzvah, a good deed done out of religious duty, to refer to the teenage friends’ imperative to stand up for “civil rights” within the space of Mona’s family’s restaurant, and gemilut hassadim, acts of loving-kindness, in the context of promoting “black independence.”88 Mona’s Asian American racial consciousness, articulated as a strategic alliance with Black liberation, is therefore mapped through Jewish coordinates. Returning full circle to the novel’s opening, the description of the Changs as the “New Jews” can therefore take on new meaning: to become a “New Jew” is not only to become a “model minority and Great American Success”—it also refers to Asian Americans’ ethical imperative to take up the Jewish mantle of social justice and fight alongside society’s oppressed, such as African Americans in the United States.89 But what about the imperialistic nature of U.S. racial formation and subjugation? What about Palestine and the Six Day War of 1967? Palestine indeed haunts the novel, which in turn presents one representation of the Asian American Movement’s “historical memory.”90 Before concluding with the novel’s deconstructionist treatment of nationalism—both white American nationalism and Zionist Israeli nationalism—I’d like to provide a quick detour via June Jordan, in order to more explicitly articulate the relationship between Black liberation and Palestinian liberation, and how the Asian American Movement’s alignment with racial justice for African Americans can and perhaps should—indeed did, if we understand the novel as representing a subsequently occluded narrative of the historical Asian American Movement and the capacious, coalitional nature of Asian American political subjectivity—extend to justice for Palestinians. In her now-famous poem “Moving Towards Home,” Caribbean American poet, essayist, teacher, and activist June Jordan articulated her response as a Black woman to the massacre by Israeli and Phalange (a Christian Lebanese right-wing party) forces of hundreds of Palestinians residing in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in September 1982.91 In the long second stanza, Jordan describes the violence of the massacre in heart-wrenching detail, though each detail is proceeded by the insistence “I do not wish to speak about . . . ” Rather than reproduce the violence of the massacre with another layer of voyeuristic representational violence, Jordan insists in the latter part of this second stanza, “I need to speak about living room”—“living room” here connoting the domestic sphere, the private space of family and intimacy away from the prying eyes of the media, the site of “home.”92 Following this feminist intervention, the third stanza reads: I was born a Black woman and now

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I am become a Palestinian against the relentless laughter of evil there is less and less living room and where are my loved ones?93 Such layering of racial subjectivity—what Keith Feldman describes as a “relational enactment of home”—mirrors Mona’s own multiplicitous racial becoming: I was born a Chinese American woman/ and now/ I am become a Jewish Asian American.94 The repetition of verbs with a différance in the third line—“am become”—is not a typo, but rather a superimposition of different temporalities and subjectivities: Mona simultaneously is Chinese and becoming Jewish and Asian American. Furthermore, such racial becoming does not take place in a political vacuum, but rather is grounded by the historical context of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, the 1967 Six Day War, and the fight for Palestinian liberation. Jordan’s poem ends with a single line: “It is time to make our way home.” But where is home for someone like Jordan, like Mona? Indeed, given that Jen’s whole novel represents a process of racial deconstruction and proliferation, undermining the stability of any and all political and racial categories with humor and quirk, it is unsurprising that Jen also destabilizes the concept of home, disidentifying with nationalism.95 Rather than feeling like she “belong[s] in the promised land,” as the novel’s opening page had proclaimed, Mona feels like a “stranger in a strange land.”96 Such an observation is made immediately after Mona’s place in the Jewish Temple Youth Group is questioned. However, the provocation is raised at least twice more, expanding its range of signification. The first time occurs when Mona’s classmate’s siblings wonder aloud whether China or America is Mona’s home—the former seeming more intuitive to the Jewish American children, although Mona has never been there, and the latter doubted, even though Mona was born here.97 The second time occurs when Mona confides in Seth, who poses as Mona’s childhood Asian American crush Sherman over the phone in order to win back her affection (Jewish American Seth, it should be noted, ultimately becomes Asian American in order to become Mona’s life-long lover and ultimately husband; layered racial subjectivity is therefore laterally distributed in the novel). Also [Mona] tells him (by way of switching the subject) what it’s like to be not Wasp, and not black, and not as Jewish as Jewish can be; and not from Chinatown, either. “You’re a sore thumb,” says Sherman. “Sticking out by yourself.” She says, “I’m never at home.” He says he knows how she feels; he’s in the same ship.98 What are the political implications of feeling “never at home”? First, such inability to fit stable racial categories works for unfix the stability of the categories themselves. Second, such an embrace of never feeling at home can be read as an embrace of a diasporic sensibility: one that has the ability to critique both American exceptionalism, manifested as settler militarism, racial capitalism, and transpacific imperialism, as well as Zionism, manifested as the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.99 Indeed, if “home” always already risks becoming a Homebase, à la Shawn Wong, such a destabilization of narratives of home offers one critique of a particular Asian American political subjectivity grounded in claiming space in America, at the expense of racialized others. Instead of “home,” Mona in the Promised Land offers us the figure of the “ship”: a synecdoche that calls to mind the Vietnamese boat refugees and their post-1975 diasporic passage.100 Ships too connote movement and passage—the tracing out of an archipelago of Asian American diaspora and Vietnamese refugee resettlement. Although Homebase and Mona in the Promised Land provide critical insights for rewriting the historical memory of the Asian

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American Movement of the 1960-70s, shedding light on how Guam and Israel-Palestine have shaped Asian American political subjectivity since the term’s inception, in both novels Vietnam is but a backdrop, the subjects of the Vietnam War granted no voice. The novels therefore present not a homecoming, but rather a point of departure for the following chapters. Both historical archives as well as the field’s subsequent disciplinary formation have occluded the foundational role of these two sites, necessitating the turn to literature as “a practical site” of the Asian American Movement’s “historical memory.”101 These two Asian American novels firmly ground the centrality of Guam and Israel-Palestine—and the questions regarding settler colonialism that these texts raise—to Asian American political subjectivity and Asian Americanist critique. The Vietnam War, and the post-1975 Vietnamese refugee diaspora, profoundly shaped and reshaped Asian American political subjectivity. While the Vietnam War galvanized different Asian ethnic groups in the United States to identify the racist nature of U.S. imperialism, anti-Communist refugees subsequently challenged the presumed leftist orientation and expression of Asian American politics. Via an analysis of archival materials and cultural production from Vietnam, Guam, Israel-Palestine, and the continental United States, the following chapters of this dissertation seek to answer the following questions: What role did Vietnam—as a country, political ideology, and international symbol—play during the Cold War, Third World Liberation movement? How has Vietnam been triangulated in relation to Guam and Israel-Palestine? What politics and epistemologies of the ship—of nước (water, country, homeland)—can a study of Vietnamese refugee diaspora offer? How are Vietnamese refugees absorbed into settler colonial states implicated in processes of Indigenous dispossession, producing a “refugee settler condition”? How can an exilic poetics, articulated through refugeehood and diaspora, offer a critique of settler colonialism and settler militarism? How can Asian Americans address the dangers associated with claiming the United States as their unequivocal Homebase or Promised Land? What happens if we instead understood home as a ship, as water, as nước?

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1 Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land, 1st Edition, Vintage Contemporaries (New York: Vintage, 1996), 195. 2 Daryl J. Maeda, Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 3 Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che, New ed. (New York: Verso, 2006); Shelley Sang-Hee Lee, A New History of Asian America (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014); Maeda, Chains of Babylon; Ronald T. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, 1st ed (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989). 4 Colleen Lye and Rachel C. Lee, “The Asian American 1960s,” in The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 214. 5 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 255. 6 For examples of recent works grappling with Asian settler colonialism and settler militarism, see for example Dean Itsuji Saranillio, “Why Asian Settler Colonialism Matters: A Thought Piece on Critiques, Debates, and Indigenous Difference,” Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3–4 (2013): 280–94; Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Fovernance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’i (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008); Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). For scholarship from the 1980-90s that focuses on questions of immigration, assimilation, and the model minority myth, see for example Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History, Twayne’s Immigrant Heritage of America Series (Boston: Twayne, 1991); Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); Timothy P. Fong, The Contemporary Asian American Experience: Beyond the Model Minority, 1st ed. (Ann Arbor: Prentice Hall, University of Michigan, 1998); Elaine H. Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); Gary Y. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994); Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 1st ed. (New York: Routledge, 1986); Ronald T. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, 1st ed (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989); Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Min Zhou, Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). For evidence of the anti-imperialist, anti-military politics of 1960-70s Asian American activism, see for example “Gidra,” the magazine produced by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center and Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel, 1st ed (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2010). My argument here parallels Yến Lê Espiritu’s 2006 argument that Asian American Studies and American Studies reorient itself away from “benign narratives of American exceptionalism, immigration, or even transnationalism” and instead grapple with the “crucial issues of war, race, and violence.” Whereas Espiritu articulates this argument in relation to the emerging field of critical refugee studies, however, I want to suggest that this reorientation has origins in an earlier Asian American political moment, prior to the post-1975 Vietnam War

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refugee crisis. Yen Lê Espiritu, “Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in US Scholarship,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, no. 1–2 (2006): 426. 7 For more on how Mao Zedong’s concept of contradiction informed the Asian American movement of the 1960s, and subsequent Asian American historical novels, see Lye and Lee, “The Asian American 1960s.” 8 Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States. 9 Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 1. 10 Maeda, Chains of Babylon, 50. 11 Patrick Wolfe, “Purchase by Other Means: Dispossessing the Natives in Palestine,” in Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016), 203–38. 12 Jen, Mona in the Promised Land, 1. 13 Jen, 1. 14 In an interview, Jen herself acknowledged the “purely comic” tone of the novel. See Gish Jen, So, aren’t you going to ask if I’m Jewish?, interview by Ron Hogan, The Beatrice Interview, 1996, http://www.beatrice.com/interviews/jen/. Literary critic Caroline Rody too has noted the “downright cheeriness” in tone of the novel. See Caroline Rody, The Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in Contemporary Asian American Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 90. 15 Michele Byers, “Material Bodies and Performative Identities: Mona, Neil, and the Promised Land,” Philip Roth Studies 2, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 102–20; Andrew Furman, “Immigrant Dreams and Civic Promises: (Con-)Testing Identity in Early Jewish AmericanLiterature and Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land,” MELUS 25, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 209–26; Begoña Simal González, “The (Re)Birth of Mona Changowitz: Rituals and Ceremonies of Cultural Conversion AndSelf- Making in ‘Mona in the Promised Land,’” MELUS 26, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 225–42; Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). 16 Jen, Mona in the Promised Land, 302. 17 Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity. 18 Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 19 Colleen Lye, “Racial Form,” Representations 104, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 92–101; Lye and Lee, “The Asian American 1960s,” 215. 20 Jen, Mona in the Promised Land, 302. 21 Jen, 296–304. 22 Fu-Jen Chen, “Performing Identity in Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land,” The International Fiction Review 34, no. 1 & 2 (2007), https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/IFR/article/view/4225/4752; González, “The (Re)Birth of Mona Changowitz: Rituals and Ceremonies of Cultural Conversion AndSelf-Making in ‘Mona in the Promised Land’”; Erika T. Lin, “Mona on the Phone: The Performative Body and Racial Identity in ‘Mona in the PromisedLand,’” MELUS 28, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 47–57. 23 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 24 Hsuan L. Hsu, “Guahan (Guam), Literary Emergence, and the American Pacific in Homebase and from Unincorporated Territory,” American Literary History 24, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 287.

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25“‘In fact, when I started writing Homebase in the late 60s, there were one or two obscure books about Chinese in America in print. And, the only two works of literary fictions were Diana Chang’s The Frontiers of Love, originally published in 1956, and Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea, originally published in 1961, and both were currently out of print.’” Also: “If you went to college in the late 1960s as I did, campuses were in turmoil over the Vietnam war, civil rights, and the establishment of ethnic studies on college campuses.” Shawn Wong, Homebase (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), xi, xiv. 26 Wong, 66. 27 This echoes Hsu’s argument that Rainford’s “exceptionalist desire to find and lay claim to Chinese American remains in U.S. landscapes is belied by the formative—yet understated—time that he and his parents spent on Guam, where his father worked on an Air Force base.” Hsu, “Guahan (Guam), Literary Emergence, and the American Pacific,” 288. In my research of the secondary literature surrounding Homebase, Hsu is the only other critic to discuss Guam in his analysis of the text. 28 This national allegorical technique is common in postcolonial novels. In Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, for example, the main character and narrator, Saleem Sinai, is born at the exact moment that India becomes an independent country. 29 Earlier in the text he also writes: “I was six and until we had moved to Guam I remembered only a few isolated events out of my childhood to Berkeley, where my parents were students. When we returned to Berkeley in 1957, Father was dead. And I remembered everything.” Wong, Homebase, 4. 30 Wong, Reading Asian American Literature, 142; Hsu, “Guahan (Guam), Literary Emergence, and the American Pacific,” 289. 31 Rody, The Interethnic Imagination, 104. 32 Wong, Homebase, 48. 33 Wong, 24. Emphasis in original. 34 Wong, 3–4. For more on the erasure of Chinese laborers in historical representations of the transcontinental railroad, see chapter one, “I’ve Been (Re)Working on the Railroad: Photography and National History in China Men and Donald Duk,” in David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 35–103. 35 Wong, Homebase, 96. 36 An “unincorporated community” is a region of land that is not governed by its own local municipal corporation, but rather is administered as part of a larger administrative division (such as a township, parish, borough, county, city, canton, state, province or country). 37 Wong, Homebase, 5. 38 Wong, 8–9. For more on the theme of fatherless sons in Asian American literature, see Frank Chin, The Chickencoop Chinaman/ The Year of the Dragon: Two Plays (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981). 39 Wong, Homebase, 9. 40 Wong, Reading Asian American Literature, 8; For an example of Chin’s condemnation of Kingston, see Frank Chin, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,” in The Big Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, ed. Jeffery Paul Chan et al. (New York: Meridian, 1991), 1–93. 41 Wong, Homebase, 5–6. 42 “‘Home on the Range’ to Stay,” The Rotarian 87, no. 3 (Sept. 1955), 40.

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43 Kansas Historical Society, “Home on the Range,” December 2014, https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/home-on-the-range/17165. 44 ScoutSongs.com, “Home on the Range,” https://www.scoutsongs.com/lyrics/home-on-the- range.html. 45 Wong, Homebase, 68. 46 For more on the “military-industrial complex,” see John H. Hinshaw and Peter N. Stearns, Industrialization in the Modern World: From the Industrial Revolution to the Internet (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2014), 316-317. 47 Yu-ting Huang, “Between Sovereignties: Chinese Minor Settler Literature Across the Pacific” (UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015). 48 Wong, Homebase, 96. 49 Catherine Fung, “‘This Isn’t Your Battle Or Your Land’: The Native American Occupation of Alcatraz in the Asian-American Political Imagination,” College Literature 41, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 159. 50 Hsu, “Guahan (Guam), Literary Emergence, and the American Pacific,” 287, 293. 51 Hsu, 293; for more on Asian settler colonialism, see Saranillio, “Why Asian Settler Colonialism Matters”; and Day, Alien Capital. 52 For a critique of a longer history of American settlers “playing Indian” and “going native” in order to establish settler nativity, see Philip Joseph Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 53 Hsu also highlights how the “indigenous inhabitants of Guam” are “never mentioned in Rainsford’s account of the time his family spent on the island while his father worked as an engineer on US bases.” Hsu, “Guahan (Guam), Literary Emergence, and the American Pacific,” 292. 54 Juliet Nebolon, “‘Life Given Straight from the Heart’: Settler Militarism, Biopolitics, and Public Health in Hawai’i during World War II,” American Quarterly 69, no. 1 (March 2017): 40. 55 Nebolon’s own article is based on research in Hawai’i. See Nebolon, “Life Given Straight from the Heart.” 56 Wong, Homebase, 5. 57 For more on understanding the Korean and Vietnam wars as struggles for decolonization, see Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 58 Wong, Homebase, 38. 59 Hsu alludes this argument in an aside: “Although the originary, vanished town of Rainsford, California, ‘no longer exists,’ Rainsford’s family and those of other displaced Asian Americans may claim a ‘homebase’ by supporting overseas bases like Orote.” Hsu, “Guahan (Guam), Literary Emergence, and the American Pacific,” 290. 60 See, for example, “‘Are We Not Also Asians?’ Building Solidarity through Opposition to the Vietnam War,” in Maeda, Chains of Babylon, 97–126. 61 Jen, Mona in the Promised Land, 3. 62 Judith Apter Klinghoffer, Vietnam, Jews, and the Middle East: Unintended Consequences (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 63 Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988). 64 Schlund-Vials, Modeling Citizenship; Day, Alien Capital. 65 Jen, Mona in the Promised Land, 134.

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66 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (June 2008): 1–14; Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). 67 Jen, Mona in the Promised Land, 134–35. 68 Jen, 135. 69 Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” in Theorizing Diaspora, ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 85–118. 70 Jen, Mona in the Promised Land, 141. 71 Jen, 141. 72 For more on how Zionism does not adequately respect particularity and difference, see Boyarin and Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity.” 73 Jen, Mona in the Promised Land, 201. 74 Jen, 202. 75 Boyarin and Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” 91–92. 76 Jen, Mona in the Promised Land, 154. 77 Jen, 155. 78 Jen, 155. 79 Jen, 118. 80 Jen, 119. 81 Stuart Hall, “Encoding, Decoding,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1993). 82 Jen, Mona in the Promised Land, 170. 83 Angela Davis and Lisa Lowe, “Reflections on Race, Class, and Gender in the USA,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1998), 320. 84 Jen, Mona in the Promised Land, 190. Emphasis in original. 85 Jen, 32. 86 For a more extreme version of this argument, see Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Slezkine argues that the Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and that the figure of the Jew is the epitome of modern life. 87 Jen, Mona in the Promised Land, 135. 88 Jen, 134, 141. 89 Jen, 3. 90 Lye and Lee, “The Asian American 1960s,” 214. 91 June Jordan, “Moving Towards Home,” reprinted in Al-Awad: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, Until Return 1, no. 1 (2007): http://www.al-awda.org/until-return/june.html. Originally published in June Jordan, Moving Towards Home: Political Essays (London: Virago, 1989). 92 For more on this argument of refusing representational violence, see Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 93 Jordan, “Moving Towards Home.” 94 Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 186. 95 Muñoz, Disidentifications.

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96 Jen, Mona in the Promised Land, 3, 33. 97 Jen, 182. 98 Jen, 231. 99 Boyarin and Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity”; Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2015). 100 For more on the literary importance of the figure of the ship, see for example the centrality of the whaling ship Pequod in Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (London: Macmillan Collector’s Library, 2016). 101 Lye and Lee, “The Asian American 1960s,” 214.

54 Chapter 2: Vietnam, Palestine, Guam: A Diasporic History of Struggles for Decolonization

On 2 September 1975, Vietnam, Palestine, and Guam were juxtaposed on the front page of the Pacific Daily News (PDN), Guam’s official newspaper. The top half of the front page featured two articles: one reporting the impending Interim Peace Agreement between Israel and Egypt—also known as the Sinai II agreement—and the other covering Palestine’s indignant response of resistance.1 During the 1967 Six Day War, Israel had gained control of the Sinai Peninsula oil fields. Eight years later, the Egypt-Israel Interim Peace Agreement established a cease-fire between the two countries in exchange for Egypt’s partial reclamation of the oil fields, strengthening diplomatic relations between Egypt, Israel, and the United States. This alienated the Arab League and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), who refused to normalize relations with the Zionist state that had dispossessed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. The second article on the front page of this PDN issue quoted PLO leader Yasser Arafat, who declared “‘in the name of Palestine that the American solution cannot and will not succeed. We will liberate Palestine with our bodies, blood and soul.’”2 Meanwhile, the bottom half of this newspaper page featured a local article covering violent riots at Camp Asan, initiated by a group of restless Vietnamese refugees bent on pressuring the U.S. government to meet their demands for repatriation back to Vietnam.3 Although most Vietnamese refugees hosted on Guam during Operation New Life went on to settle on the U.S. mainland, several thousand desired to return to their newly reunified country, challenging the American narrative of humanitarian rescue.4 Despite the method of “critical juxtaposition” that this front page of the PDN invites, in contemporary historiography Vietnam, Palestine, and Guam are rarely discussed in relation to one another.5 This is due in part to the academy’s division of the world into area studies—itself a Cold War project of knowledge production—which posits Vietnam, Palestine, and Guam as “discretely bounded objects” of analysis with “isolated origins and independent progressive development.”6 Even Asian American Studies, which in its diasporic turn has probed the “intimacies” between different continents, has only recently begun to claim the Middle East as part of West Asia and the Pacific Islands as part of the Asian Pacific, rendering Palestine and Guam fruitful sites for juxtaposition.7 Likewise the interdisciplinary field of transnational American Studies, which seeks to “decenter the United States and analyze its centralized imperial power,” often limits its study of empire to the U.S. and one “Other,” failing to address how these multiple Others relate not only to the U.S., but also directly to one other.8 Such field formations offer few tools for analyzing the critical juxtapositions captured on the front page of this September 2nd issue of the PDN—juxtapositions which evidence the fact that the struggles for decolonization in Vietnam, Palestine, and Guam were coeval, and although divergent in form and expression, ultimately mutually constitutive. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how tracing the archipelagic nature of Vietnamese refugee resettlement materializes connections between Vietnam, Palestine, and Guam, seemingly disparate spaces on the supposed margins of U.S. military empire. This chapter focuses on the decolonial movements that shape(d) these spaces: Chamorro quests for self-determination and Palestinian struggles for liberation. Critically engaging these connections requires putting critical refugee studies in conversation with settler colonial studies: while the latter attends to the particularity of Indigenous land struggles at specific sites, the former provides an analytic—the diasporic refugee—for tracing the connections between these spaces. Importantly, we can trace this diasporic refugee figure not only forwards, but also backwards in time, prior to the point of

55 post-war refugee departure. That is, if we take the post-1975 refugee diaspora as an analytic that materializes the archipelagic connections between different spaces of U.S. military empire, then we can also begin to interrogate and illuminate the pre-existing connections between these spaces that prefigured—indeed, set the grounds for—this particular route of refugee passage.9 Focusing on the 1967-1987 period—the year of the Six Day War in Israel-Palestine to the year of the Commonwealth Act in Guam—this chapter demonstrates how the histories and political trajectories of Vietnam, Palestine, and Guam were mutually constitutive even prior to their prominent roles in both creating and harboring the Vietnamese refugee diaspora. The “knotted itineraries” of these spaces stretch back to an earlier moment of Cold War entanglement, Third World solidarity, and U.S. imperial aggression: when groups in Vietnam, Palestine, and Guam began to envision and enact a political horizon of decolonization.10 By highlighting the previously overlooked connections between these spaces, I demonstrate how an alternative mapping of the pre-1975 world—one attendant to the global reverberations of war, revolution, and liberation—enables us to make sense of the post-1975 circulations of refugee bodies, affects, and politics displaced by the Vietnam War. The front page of this PDN issue is but one condensed, material trace of these connections. Marking the tail end of Operation New Life and occurring two years before the absorption of Vietnamese refugees into the State of Israel, this front page is an ephemeral point of transition, prefiguring both the conclusion of Operation New Life on Guam and the upcoming importance of Israel-Palestine in the story of Vietnamese refugee diaspora. This chapter models what I call “diasporic history”: one that traces connections between seemingly unrelated spaces and times in order to illuminate contours of power—in this case, U.S. military empire—and articulate points of coalition between differentially-situated struggles against this structure of power—such as the decolonial movements in Vietnam, Palestine, and Guam. Unlike previous models of writing history across multiple continents, such as world history, global history, and transnational history, diasporic history is not organized around a particular empire, superpower, or nation-state.11 Rather, it privileges spaces and peoples on the seeming margins of grand historical narratives, drawing attention to South-South relations: the exchange of political knowledge, military strategy, and solidarity rhetoric between actors of the global South. Because it attends to the reverberations of war and imperialism at multiple sites simultaneously, it upends linear notions of causal temporality, resembling instead what Deleuze and Guattari have coined a rhizomatic structure.12 Diasporic history need not necessarily be organized around a particular ethnic group. Chapters three through six trace the passage and resettlement of Vietnamese refugee diaspora: a group distinguished from other waves of Vietnamese immigrants and expatriates and therefore defined less by ethnic origin than by the particular historical moment of the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam. However, the connections that I draw in this chapter both precede and exceed this post-1975 exodus. Building on the work of scholars such as Daniel Boyarin, James Clifford, Brent Hayes Edwards, Stuart Hall, and Andreas Huyssen, I push the field of diaspora theory to consider not only the anthropological and spatial aspects of diaspora, but the temporal facets as well: how does diasporic history unfold both synchronically and diachronically across time?13 Developing Hall’s reformulation of “diaspora” as a formation defined less by a “sacred homeland” and an “imperializing,” “hegemonizing” form of ethnicity than by “heterogeneity and diversity,” “transformation and difference,” I hereby propose a diasporic history not of a people, but of a struggle: the global struggle for decolonization of the 1960-80s.14 That is, how did the theory and practice of decolonization travel, transform, and adapt to the historically specific

56 spaces of Vietnam, Palestine, and Guam during this period? How did U.S. military intervention in one part of the world affect the manifestation of struggle in another? How did one group’s articulation of self-determination influence the horizon of political possibility imaged by another? I argue the Palestine and Guam’s heterogeneous expressions of decolonization, and their different relationships to the Vietnamese revolutionary struggle, can be explained by these two sites’ divergent relationships to the United States. Palestine, subjugated by U.S.-backed Israeli settler colonialism and marked as a space of potential Soviet influence, harbored PLO leaders that actively fostered rhetorical and military solidarity with Vietnamese nationalist leaders. Meanwhile Guam, as a territory of the United States, was positioned at odds with the Vietnamese decolonial struggle, given the profusion of U.S. military bases on Guam that were activated to support American war efforts in Vietnam. Therefore, struggles for self- determination on Guam during this period, compared to those in Palestine, did not as explicitly forge connections with the Vietnamese anti-imperialist cause. Given the politically limbo state of Guam as an unincorporated territory, Chamorro initiatives instead vacillated between calls for full integration into the U.S. (i.e. statehood) and pushes for Indigenous sovereignty. I ultimately argue, however, that demilitarization and decolonization of Guam would have helped the Vietnamese revolutionary cause, by curbing U.S. military influence in the Asian Pacific region. Anti-imperialist activists, therefore, should invest in ongoing Chamorro struggles for decolonization. In this project I seek to query not only how one can best write a history of a diaspora, but also how one can write history diasporically. Such a methodology necessitates a reading practice that spans across seemingly disparate texts from different times, spaces, and genres— archival documents, oral histories, memoirs, film, and poetry—and that utilizes what Yến Lê Espiritu calls “critical juxtaposing”: the “bringing together of seemingly disconnected events, communities, histories, and spaces in order to illuminate what would otherwise not be visible about the contours, contents, and afterlives of war and empire.”15 My goal in this chapter is to illuminate the political connections between Vietnam, Palestine, and Guam while attending to the historical specificity of each site. The purpose of doing so is threefold: to present a more complex picture of U.S. military empire and its differential treatment of asymmetrical anti- imperialist struggles; to demonstrate how these struggles imagined solidarities and coalitions with one another; and to show how the historical connections between these spaces prefigured the route of passage of Vietnamese refugee diaspora, itself partially the product of U.S. military intervention, post-1975. That is, post-war Vietnamese refugee resettlement patterns visualize the archipelagic connections between spaces of Cold War U.S. military empire and state-imposed settler colonialism. This diasporic history charts yet another genealogy of connections between concurrent, locally-situated struggles for decolonization. The first part of this chapter focuses on the connections between Vietnam and Palestine from 1967—the year of the June Six Day War in which Israel initiated its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (as well as the Sinai Peninsula, which it later rescinded, and the Golan Heights, the western portion of which remains occupied) and the year that the U.S. significantly intensified its longstanding support of Israel—to 1975—the year that the Vietnam War (alternatively called the American War in Vietnam) ended with the U.S.’s defeat and the Communists’ unification of the country. During this period, Cold War ideologies projected a particular mapping of the world: one neatly divided into geopolitical spaces of democracy versus autocracy, free market liberalism versus Communism, the U.S. versus the U.S.S.R. In American foreign policy, Vietnam and Palestine became entangled via their allegedly shared susceptibility

57 to Soviet Union influence.16 Such Cold War entanglements, however, had to contend with an emerging Third World movement of decolonial, anti-racist, pro-Indigenous solidarities, critical of the imperialist nature of both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R (and in the Vietnamese case, Communist China). These solidarities—demonstrations of political support and acknowledgements of a common struggle—took multiple forms: rhetorical overtures, arms exchanges, financial transactions, and diplomatic relations. Using these two frames—Cold War entanglements, Third World solidarities—I trace alliances of collaboration and co-optation, conflicts of ideology and geopolitical competition, that connected not only Vietnam and Palestine, but also Israel, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Communist China. My focus on the 1967-1975 period is contextualized by a longer history of Vietnam’s shifting relationships with pre-1948 Zionists in search of a homeland, post-1948 Palestinian freedom fighters, and then post-1993 (post-Oslo) Israeli business partners—shifts which can partly be attributed to Vietnam’s own changing political status—a French colony from 1887 to 1954, a divided country at war from 1954 to 1975, and then a unified Communist state post-1975.17 Rather than take “Vietnam” and “Palestine” as stable, ahistorical spaces and metonymies for decolonial actors, I trace their usage as grounded, rhetorical signifiers, demonstrating how different political actors—U.S. foreign policy makers, Soviet Union officials, non-aligned heads of state, Black Americans, and leaders of the Vietnamese and Palestinian liberation movements themselves— co-constituted their own political positions in relation to these two capacious terms. This is the first study to focus on Vietnam-Palestine relations between 1967 and 1975. I supplement existing secondary literature on Cold War, Third World international politics with original archival research conducted at the Institute of Palestine Studies (IPS) in Ramallah during summer 2016. I rely heavily on the International Documents on Palestine (IDP), annual anthologies of re-printed newspaper articles, public speeches, and United Nations documents pertaining to Palestine’s relations with other countries and political groups in a given year. Collated and published by the Institute of Palestine Studies, these anthologies are subject to IPS’s archival choices of inclusion and omission. However, as Derrida has taught us, are not all archives political projects of a given state?18 And if we must inevitably choose which state archive, which historical narrative, to engage, why not choose that of Palestine, a nation whose history has been brutally erased by Zionist narratives of terra nullius? Indeed, in the face of Israel’s current denial of Palestinian sovereignty in the form of a political state, the IPS archive functions as a performance of sovereignty that prefigures an independent state—one that attempts to enact state claims to authority regarding a contested history. Given previous scholarship’s overwhelming elision of Palestine’s narration of its own internationalist history, I here highlight IPS’s archival choices, cross-referencing and supplementing these texts with other newspaper clippings, public speeches, and government documents from this time period.19 The second part of this chapter disaggregates Guam, an unincorporated territory, from the greater empire of the United States. As the host of Andersen Air Force Base and Naval Base Guam, two U.S. military bases that played prominent roles in facilitating U.S. aggression during the Vietnam War, Guam is implicated in the U.S.’s imperial opposition to struggles for liberation in Vietnam and, less directly, in Palestine. However, Guam as an unincorporated territory, is also a colonial possession subject to U.S. federal control. Since Guam’s absorption into American imperial purview in 1898, the island’s native population, the taotao tano or Chamorros, has struggled for self-determination. This section focuses on the political evolution of their struggle for self-determination, articulated first as a demand for U.S. citizenship pre- 1950 and then developing into a call for decolonization and indigenous rights, culminating in the

58 Commonwealth Act of 1987. It draws heavily from former Guam governor Joseph F. Ada’s powerful article, “The Quest for Commonwealth, the Quest for Change.”20 Part history and part manifesto, and published as part of a Chamorro nationalist education initiative, this document serves as both an archive of Guam’s long decolonization struggle and as a primary document of the Commonwealth Movement’s political rhetoric. Although Chamorro leaders did not explicitly invoke solidarity with Vietnamese or Palestinian revolutionaries such as Hồ Chí Minh or Yasser Arafat, I argue that the rise of Chamorro nationalism during this period was influenced by the Cold War-era Third World Liberation moment that had shaped those two revolutions. Attending to different expressions of decolonization—self-determination via political negotiation versus national liberation via guerrilla warfare—that are in turn shaped by different political situations—unincorporated territory of the U.S. versus site of foreign imperial intervention—I nonetheless draw connections between these multiple spaces, writing a diasporic history of struggles for decolonization that were opposed to U.S. military domination during this period. For later chapters in which I detail the ways that military formations differentially racialize peoples from Vietnam, Palestine, and Guam—pitting them in antagonistic relationships in order to uphold U.S. military empire—it will be important to recall this alternative genealogy of interconnected resistance. As with the previous section, which cautions against a homogenization of the terms “Vietnam” and “Palestine”—rhetorical signifiers that alternatively refer to countries, people, and struggles, and that took on different political connotations depending on the speaker or author— in this section I also disaggregate the multiple referents for the signifier “Guam”: alternatively an unincorporated territory of the U.S., an American colony, a homeland to the indigenous Chamorro people, and a prominent U.S. military stronghold in the Pacific; the Chamorro people specifically, versus a broader multiracial community of unincorporated U.S. citizens with incomplete access to Constitutional rights; or a struggle against U.S. military dominance expressed as a desire for either U.S. statehood, independence, free association, commonwealth, or some other political status. Attending to these multiple resonances and significations, I trace the complex evolution of Guam’s struggle for self-determination during a period of global revolution and decolonization, setting the grounds for a more nuanced understanding of the Vietnamese refugee diaspora’s place in local Indigenous politics.

VIETNAM AND PALESTINE Cold War Entanglements: U.S. Foreign Policy in Vietnam and the Middle East In American Cold War history the “Vietnamese-Middle Eastern connection” has been “effectively buried,” due in part to government interest.21 International relations scholar Judith Klinghoffer argues that both the U.S. and the Soviet Union were embarrassed by their foreign policies in Vietnam and the Middle East during the Cold War and subsequently “vociferously reject[ed] any relationship between the two conflicts.”22 Whereas the “American policy makers were widely criticized for permitting their preoccupation with Vietnam to lead to the neglect of the Middle East” and later were “constantly accused of being willing to sacrifice Israeli interests on the altar of an advantageous exit from Vietnam,” the Soviets “were accused of inciting the Arabs to war, and then ‘selling them out.’”23 During the 1967-1975 period however comparisons between Vietnam and the Middle East—including Palestine—dominated U.S. foreign policy. Subscribing to a “Cold War logics and epistemology,” in which American foreign policy was driven by an objective of socialist/communist containment, U.S. officials used the threat of Soviet Union expansion to justify imperialist intervention into these two regions.24 In short, U.S.

59 foreign policy critically juxtaposed Vietnam and Palestine by identifying the common threat of Soviet influence in both Southeast Asia and the Middle East. In contrast to Third World Solidarity, Cold War entanglement is defined less by mutual connections than by racialized hierarchies of attachment. In the late 1960s, following the Tết Offensive, U.S. officials debated whether to de-escalate the unpopular war in Vietnam in order to pivot military resources to the Soviet Union’s growing influence in the Middle East, driven in no small part by a calculation of each region’s comparative utility for expanding U.S. hegemony and wealth.25 For example in “We Should De-escalate the Importance of Vietnam,” published in the New York Times on 21 December 1969, George W. Ball, former Under Secretary of State (1961-1966) and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (1968), discredits President Eisenhower’s 1954 domino theory, arguing that the U.S. need not continue its war in Vietnam in order to curb the spread of Communism to the rest of Southeast Asia. Dismissing Vietnam as an “area of marginal strategic importance” and belittling American commitments to the South Vietnamese army and their vision for a democratic Vietnam, Ball argues that the U.S. should instead turn its attention to the Middle East.26 In “Suez Is the Front To Watch,” published half a year later, Ball uses stark Cold War calculation to defend his titular thesis, dispensing with the liberal rhetoric of “democracy” and “freedom” more often used by politicians during this period to justify U.S. intervention abroad. While South Vietnam has “little significance for either economic or geographic reasons,” he argues, the Middle East is “an economic prize of extraordinary value,” an “area of concentrated American investment,” that “does lie near the center of world power”—what he identifies as “Central and Western Europe.”27 For Ball, a strategic plan of U.S. imperialism would lead to capitalist expansion and increased wealth. A shift towards the Middle East would also appease the increasingly vocal Jewish American contingent of voters, who criticized the American war in Vietnam but advocated greater U.S. intervention in defense of Israel, following the 1967 Six Day War. These liberal voters, identified ironically by Klinghoffer “Hoves and Dawks,” sought to rhetorically disentangle Vietnam from the Middle East in order to justify their seemingly contradictory anti- Vietnam War, pro-Middle East intervention position.28 But their performance of what Edward Said has critiqued as “moral acrobatics” instead elucidate the vexed entanglement between American liberal ideology and Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine, which represents Israel as the “only [Western] democracy in the Middle East.”29 For American strategists like Ball, however, the interests of Israel, like that of Vietnam, were actually secondary to the U.S.’s Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, suggesting that Israel could at any time be abandoned, as the U.S. had abandoned South Vietnam. For example, although Ball pays lips service to U.S. support for Israel’s “efforts to realize for the Jewish people their ancient dream of a national home,” he later implies Israel’s security is incidental to America’s Cold War interests.30 Indeed, given domestic weariness regarding U.S. wars abroad—exemplified by the mass protests against, and increased lack of Congressional support for, the Vietnam War—Ball advises the Nixon administration to frame the need for U.S. intervention into the Middle East not as an “action to defend Israel from destruction at Arab hands” but rather as one to “prevent the Soviet Union from using Arab surrogate armies to extend its dominion over the Middle East.”31 In doing so, he suggests that Americans are less interested in shedding blood on behalf of the “liberty” of small nations like South Vietnam or Israel than they are with combatting the perceived threat of Soviet domination and nuclear fallout. In a television interview conducted a week after the publication of Ball’s article, President Nixon concurs with Ball’s analysis, admitting that the situation in the Middle East is “more dangerous,” and by extension, more important, than the

60 situation in Vietnam, given the potential “collision of the superpowers.”32 Like Ball, Nixon’s support for Israel, and his subsequent abandonment of the South Vietnamese cause, has as much if not more to do with maintaining “U.S. interests” and the “balance of power” than it does with supporting the Zionist project and addressing American Jews’ concerns.33 This raises the question: once American interests shift away from the region, would the U.S. abandon Israel, as it had abandoned South Vietnam?34 Thus, although liberal rhetoric underwrites Zionist narratives, liberal Jewish Americans perhaps have reason to be wary of U.S. foreign aid to Israel, both during the Cold War period as well as today—a wariness that could in turn spark further interrogation and criticism of the policies of Palestinian dispossession upheld by such gifts of foreign aid. Although American Cold War policy post-1967 drew comparisons between democratic initiatives in Israel and South Vietnam, prior to 1967 many progressive Israelis actually identified more with the North Vietnamese cause. History thus offers anti-imperialist Jews, both in Israel and in the diaspora, alternative models of solidarity. By December 1965, anti-war demonstrations in support of the Vietnamese liberation struggle had broken out in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.35 Many Israelis empathized with the North Vietnamese because as survivors and descendants of the Holocaust, they too saw themselves as victims of Western persecution, struggling to maintain their own precarious nation-state. Radical leftist Knesset member Uri Avery compared the American killing of Vietnamese freedom fighters to the German slaughter of Holocaust Jews.36 Israel’s political elite, raised in the European socialist tradition, “felt closer” to Hồ Chí Minh, the North Vietnamese Communist leader, than to Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, prime minister of South Vietnam from 1965 to 1967.37 In fact, Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion had befriended Hồ Chí Minh in 1946, when the two lived in the same Paris hotel. Before the Zionist establishment of Israel in 1948, Hồ had suggested that Ben-Gurion establish a Jewish government in exile, headquartered in Hanoi. Returning the sentiment of solidarity, Ben-Gurion asserted in 1966, “If I were the American President, I would have pulled out the American army from Vietnam, even though such a move might possibly have grave consequences.”38 As a displaced Jew, Ben-Gurion identified with Hồ’s aspirations for a liberated nation-state. Once Ben-Gurion’s nationalist aspirations became manifest as a settler colonial project, however, Hồ distanced his own Vietnamese revolution, aligning instead with the emergent Third World Liberation Movement, which articulated solidarity along decolonial, anti-racist, pro-indigenous lines, embracing a politics that disavowed the Zionist theft of Palestinian lands. Israel’s Cold War entanglement with South Vietnam over North Vietnam solidified in 1966, when popular Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan decided to tour South Vietnam to study U.S. counterinsurgency tactics. Israeli leftists, foreign officials, and American antiwar activists interpreted the trip as a deliberate move to align Israel with the U.S., and by extension against North Vietnam, Palestine, and the Soviet Union in the Cold War order.39 The following year, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol named Dayan the Minister of Defense, tasked with maintaining security in the newly occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, where Dayan put his newfound counterinsurgency intelligence to use. As U.S. support for Israel increased post-1967, exemplified by the sale of Phantom jets used in the Vietnam War to Israel in 1968, Palestinians and other non-aligned nations projected the U.S. war against North Vietnam onto Israel’s own politics.40 By the following decade, this shift had solidified: in a 1974 speech at the United Nations General Assembly’s 2282nd meeting, Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the PLO, denounced Israel’s “backing of South Viet-Nam against the Viet- Namese revolution.”41 Dismissing the Israeli left’s prior support of (North) Vietnamese national

61 independence, Palestine and non-aligned nations of the emerging Third World Liberation movement accused Israel of supporting the U.S.’s proxy war in Vietnam.

Third World Solidarities: Connected Critiques of Western Imperialism Although U.S. foreign policy drew implicit connections between Vietnam and Palestine by targeting Soviet influence in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, it would be up to other historical actors to articulate Third World solidarity between Vietnam and Palestine. Uncovering these Third World solidarities thus requires a move from an American archive of newspapers and political speeches to IPS’s archive of Palestinian internationalist history. In the texts above, neither Ball nor Nixon explicitly acknowledges the Palestinians. Ball refers to “the refugees” as one problem preventing Israel and the Arab states from “reaching a settlement” and Nixon characterizes the “fedayeen”—Palestinian freedom fighters—as “superradicals” that make the Middle East conflict a “very difficult situation.”42 But neither admits the fact that Palestinians have their own independent political stake in the conflict, with their own unique grievance against Zionist settlement and occupation of their land. In contrast, following the Six Day War of 1967, many non-Western nations—the Soviet Union, China, and non-aligned states such as Syria, Yugoslavia, and Algeria—used the analytic of “Western imperialism” to draw connections between the North Vietnamese and Arab nationalist struggles. Some actors, such as the Soviet Union, focused on Egypt, Syria, and Jordan’s territorial losses at the hand of Israel, while others, such as China, identified the Palestinians’ particular grievances more explicitly. All condemned the U.S. and Israel as imperialist forces, though how they defined the relationship between the U.S. and Israel differed based on their political orientation. The following two sub-section draw heavily from the IPS archives to illuminate this occluded history of Third World solidarity. Some non-Western actors characterized the U.S. and Israel as independent political actors who nonetheless coordinated their imperialist attacks. For example, in a Joint Communiqué in Damascus in August 1968, the Ba’th Party of Syria and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union declared that “the Zionist-imperialist aggression against the Arab countries and the American imperialist aggression against the people of Vietnam arise from an over-all imperialist plan,” which “constitute[s] a danger to world peace and the security of all peoples.”43 By identifying an “over-all imperialist plan” that threatened the “security of all peoples,” they implicitly drew connections between not only Vietnam and Palestine, but also anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles in Cuba, Cambodia, Laos, South Africa, Rhodesia, and elsewhere. Similarly, in a statement following the Israeli attack on Karameh, Jordan in March 1968, the Soviet government took the opportunity to condemn not only Israel’s “continuing aggression against neighboring Arab states,” but also the U.S.’s intervention in Vietnam, drawing parallels between the two “aggressive imperialist forces” by identifying their common objective: “to strike a blow at the national liberation movement and its advanced detachments.”44 By naming a common enemy of Western imperialism, the Soviet Union identified a single, global “national liberation movement,” short-circuiting the geographic distance between the Middle East and Vietnam. Such declarations were also self-interested however; invoking a Cold War framework, the Soviet Union implied its own position as leader of the Third World Liberation movement. Other political actors argued that Israel was just a proxy for American imperialist interests in the Middle East. For example, a May 1969 appeal by the Executive Secretariat of the Afro-Asian-Latin American Peoples’ Solidarity Organization to “Support the Arab and Palestinian Peoples’ Struggle against Israel’s Aggression,” directed at “all Revolutionary Forces and Socialist Countries,” characterized “Israel’s acts of aggression and crimes” as part of “a plan

62 drawn up by the imperialist powers which stand behind Israel and goad it on,” foremost among them being “American imperialism, which uses Israel to protect its economic, military and political interest in this part of the world.”45 For countries outside of the Middle East, U.S. imperialism presented a much more immediate threat than Israeli aggression; they thus enfolded their condemnation of Israeli aggression into a larger Cold War critique of U.S. foreign intervention. Such rhetorical statements deny Israel’s own complex history and agency, eliding important differences between Israel and the U.S.: although the U.S. did indeed offer military and financial aid to Israel at the expense of the Palestinian liberation struggle, Zionists who hoped to create a safe haven for Jews displaced by the Holocaust—even though this haven was predicated upon the further displacement and dispossession of another group, the native Palestinians—did not consider Israel a mere lackey of some U.S. imperialist “plan.”46 Nonetheless, for many non-aligned countries such as Yugoslavia, the “connection between the Middle East and Far East” was “quite clear: in our opinion the United States is responsible for both these crisis [sic].”47 In a 1974 interview, President Boumedienne of Algeria likewise insists that “problems” in Vietnam and Palestine “are identical,” wondering out loud how “Zionist propaganda [could] have secured the silence of the world” when this same world “opposed the American presence in Vietnam.”48 Although Zionism echoed some of the post-colonial non- aligned rhetoric of national independence, Israel’s sovereignty was built upon settler colonial foundations, aligning Israel more with the U.S. than with the anti-colonial, pro-Indigenous Third World Liberation movement by the late 1960s. Although a Cold War framework simplistically pits Communism and authoritarianism against capitalism and liberal democracy, Communist interests were far from homogenous.49 Wary of the Soviet Union’s unchecked rise to power over the Communist world, in June 1968 China published an article in the Peking Review accusing “the Soviet revisionist renegade clique” for “working hand in glove” with “U.S. imperialism” to push through “a so-called ‘political settlement’ of the Middle East question in an attempt to force the Arab countries to an all-around capitulation to the U.S.-Israeli aggressors.”50 Crediting the continual “awakening” of Palestinian consciousness to “Mao Tse-tung’s thought”—a claim that denied a longer history of indigenous Palestinian resistance against first the Ottoman Empire, then British colonialists, then Israeli Zionists—China critiqued UN resolutions that would “coerc[e] the Arab countries into unilaterally accepting a ‘cease-fire’” that would delegitimize the Palestinian armed uprising led by Yasser Arafat and his political party, Fateh.51 (China’s position would shift again in 1975, when it moved to increasingly align with the United States, leaving the Soviets to support anti- imperialist nationalisms in other parts of the globe.) Although such a statement reveals the inter- regional competition for power that underwrote Cold War arguments critiquing Western imperialism, it also importantly disaggregates the Palestinian liberation struggle from the larger Arab conflict with Israel. While states like Egypt and Jordan might settle for a U.S.-brokered peace with Israel in exchange for inclusion into Western capitalist markets, Palestinian freedom fighters could not afford to give up the fight for their stolen homeland. Furthermore, this statement exposes the ideological factions within the diverse Palestinian Liberation Organization. Although some leftist parties of the larger umbrella PLO, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), drew inspiration from Maoism, others drifted toward other ideologies of Marxism, indigenous resistance, and national liberation.52 Some political statements dispensed with Cold War rhetoric, calling out the racial dimensions of imperialism in order to articulate a more tangible transnational solidarity from below. In the 1940s, prior to establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, prominent Black

63 leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois had encouraged Black Americans to support Zionism, drawing comparisons between the African independence movement and the Jewish fight for a homeland. However, by the 1970s, Black American leaders aligned with the Vietnamese and Palestinian liberation struggles, connecting a “permanent state of war” against domestic people of color with the U.S.’s intervention in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.53 For example, in an advertisement featured in the 2 November 1970 issue of the New York Times, a prominent group of Black Americans expressed “complete solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters, who like us, are struggling for self-determination and an end to racist oppression.”54 Importantly, this group connected America’s “support for King Hussein’s slaughter of Palestinian refugees and freedom-fighters” with its “support of reactionary dictatorships throughout the world” such as in “Cambodia and Vietnam.”55 As in the above Peking Review article, they identified both “Zionists and Arab reactionaries” as aiding “American Imperialism.”56 Unlike previous statements cited above, however, this one critiqued not only U.S. support for Israeli settler occupation, but also Israel’s support for “United States policies of aggression in Southeast Asia, policies that are responsible for the death and wounding of thousands of black youths.”57 By pinpointing how Western imperialism affected all their communities differentially, this group weaved threads of solidarity between Vietnamese freedom fighters, Palestinian fedayeen, and disenfranchised Black Americans sent off to war. Leftist students groups and academic activists in the U.S. also identified Third World solidarities between Vietnam, Palestine, and domestic people of color. Following the Six Day War of 1967, the Organization of Arab Students (OAS) endorsed resolutions not only promoting Palestinian independence and Arab unity, but also declaring solidarity with African Americans and the National Liberation Front. Recognizing the linked struggles, they proclaimed: “Our battle is an inseparable part of the imperialistic design being executed against the dynamic revolutionary forces in the Third World.”58 Likewise, the 1969 convention resolution of the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG) drew explicit connections between the “Palestinian Revolution” and the “just cause of the people of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Black Community in the U.S.”59 In his presidential address the same year, Ibrahim Abu- Lughold further emphasized: “We stand united with our Black Brothers in the United States, South Africa, Rhodesia and in Mozambique and Angola; we stand united with the gallant fighters of Vietnam and with all other groups valiantly struggling against all manifestations of human struggle.”60 Echoing these sentiments, Naseer Aruri, a founding member of AAUG, recalls in his memoir: “We perceived our own struggle for emancipation in the Arab world in the same context of the anti-colonialist movement in Vietnam and the struggle for equality in the United States. We often considered our movement as part and parcel of the fight for third world liberation.”61 Promoting Third World solidarity on college campuses, student groups such as the Arab Student Association, the Tri-Continental Progressive Student Committee, and the Liberation Support Movement at the University of California-Berkeley and the Anti-Imperialist Movement at Columbia University organized film screenings and teach-ins drawing connections between Vietnam and Palestine, and passed out leaflets with slogans such “Vietnam-Palestine One Struggle” and “Southeast Asians Struggle for Independence, Palestinians Struggle for Freedom, G.I.s Struggle for Liberty.”62 In Communiqué #4, released following the successful jailbreak of Dr. Timothy Leary in 1970, Weather Underground, a militant left-wing organization originally founded at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, declared: “With the NLF [National Liberation Front] and the North Vietnamese, with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Al Fatah, with Rap Brown and Angela Davis, with all black and brown

64 revolutionaries, the Soledad brothers and all prisoners of war in Amerikan [sic] concentration camps we know that peace is only possible with the destruction of U.S. imperialism.”63 (Dohrn). Like the organizations discussed above, Weather Underground identified U.S. imperialism as the common agent linking diverse struggles against racialized oppression in Vietnam, Palestine, and the Americas, articulating a global Third World solidarity.

Direct Addresses: Vietnam to Palestine, Palestine to Vietnam Discourses of solidarity were produced not only about, but also by, Vietnamese and Palestinian freedom fighters between 1967 and 1975. In spring 1967 prominent Palestinian resistance poet Samih al-Qasim—one of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who was not displaced in 1948 but rather remained in Israel as a second-class citizen, unable to access the full citizenship rights afforded to Jews in the Zionist state and yet granted the luxury of a national passport—translated half a dozen quatrains of Hồ Chí Minh’s Prison Diary poetry from an English copy into Arabic for the popular Israeli Arabic-language publication al-Jadid. Drawing attention to “the parallel fates of political prisoners both at home and around the world,” Qasim not only highlighted the routine incarceration of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, but also suggested that living under Zionist martial law in Israel (which lasted until 1966) was akin to imprisonment in itself.64 Qasim’s own poetry also invoked the Vietnamese liberation struggle, drawing parallels with the Palestinian revolution. In “From a Revolutionary in the East” (1964), he writes: From a revolutionary in the East to revolutionaries lighting up the darkness to fellow revolutionaries, wherever they are in the Nile, in the Congo, in Vietnam. . . . My brothers! With blood you write your history—and headlines!65 Locating himself squarely in the “East,” Qasim subverts Western colonial distinctions between the ‘Far’ and ‘Near’ East and thus imagines stronger geopolitical connections between Vietnam and Palestine. He also perceives Third World revolutionaries as historical actors, capable of writing their own history and headlines via armed guerrilla warfare, instead of mere reactionaries to U.S. and U.S.S.R. Cold War maneuvers. Caught in their own struggle against imperial aggression, Palestinian fedayeen identified with Vietnamese revolutionaries and thus included declarations condemning U.S. imperialism in Vietnam in their public speeches and political platforms.66 But they also, like other decolonization movements around the world, drew inspiration from Vietnam. Following General Võ Nguyên Giáp’s unexpected victory over the French in the 1954 Battle of Điện Biên Phủ, Palestinian soldiers often took on the nickname “Giap.”67 Based on subsequent Vietnamese successes in holding off American troops, the leftist PFLP concluded that the guerrilla warfare “course adopted by Vietnam and Cuba is the only way in which under-developed countries can triumph and overcome the scientific and technological superiority of imperialism and neocolonialism.”68 Recognizing that they could not compete with U.S.-backed Israeli military superiority on its own terms, Palestinian fedayeen declared a people’s war, encouraging workers and peasants most vulnerable to “the oppressive exploitation process exercised by world imperialism and its allies in our homeland” to take up arms.69 PLO Executive Committee Chairman Arafat, the iconic leader of militant resistance for many years, affirmed as well the

65 “firm relationship between the Palestinian revolution and the Vietnam revolution through the experience provided to us by the heroic people of Vietnam and their mighty revolution.”70 In 1966 Abu Jihad of the Fateh party visited Vietnam and over the following years Arafat sent several groups of Palestinian soldiers to train in Vietnam and learn Vietnamese guerrilla tactics.71 In March 1970 Arafat himself flew with a delegation of Palestinian liberation fighters to Hanoi to visit Hồ Chí Minh and General Võ Nguyên Giáp. During their meeting, the latter told Arafat: “The Vietnamese and Palestinian people have much in common, just like two people suffering the same illness.”72 Giáp thus connected the Vietnamese and Palestinian liberation struggles, positioning them against the common enemy of Western imperialism.73 The fedayeen imagined turning the Middle East into a “Second Vietnam,” and one of the surrounding Arab capitals, such as Amman or Beirut, into an “Arab Hanoi,” which would then serve as a center for revolutionary action based on the Vietnamese liberationist model.74 Capitalizing on American anxiety regarding an impending military defeat in Vietnam, the Palestinian Commando Organizations released a statement on 9 August 1970 declaring, “We must make the Middle East a second Vietnam to defeat Zionism and imperialism and to liberate completely the soil of the Palestinian and Arab homeland.”75 Such a statement emerged out of the solidifying Third World Liberation solidarities, exemplified by the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the Non-Aligned Movement initiated in 1961, which defined strategic alliances between Vietnam, Palestine, and other Third World nations against the warring Eastern and Western blocs.76 At the 1973 Tenth World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin, the PLO was invited to take up the “banner of the global struggle” from Vietnamese freedom fighters, whose struggle was thought to have concluded after the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords ending direct U.S. military combat in Vietnam.77 With North Vietnam’s victory against U.S. imperialism seemingly secured, the Third World Liberation movement turned its attention to the next major anti-imperialist struggle: Palestine.78 Reflecting on the event, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish reports: “In the conscience of the peoples of the world, the torch has been passed from Vietnam to us.”79 Vietnamese freedom fighters expressed support for the Palestinian struggle in turn. North Vietnam and the PLO established ties in 1968. In a message to the International Conference for the Support of Arab Peoples held in Cairo on 24 January 1969, Hồ Chí Minh, who could not attend in person, asserted that the “Vietnamese people vehemently condemn the Israeli aggressors” and “fully support the Palestinian people’s liberation movement and the struggle of the Arab people for the liberation of territories occupied by Israeli forces.”80 As for Vietnam, it was “determined to fight the American aggressors until total victory” and thereby “fulfill its obligations” to not only “its own nation” but also “its friends in the fight against imperialism and colonialism, for independence of liberty.”81 In fighting U.S. imperialist forces in Southeast Asia, Vietnam hoped to weaken U.S. imperialism’s capacity to suppress liberation movements in other parts of the world.82 Conversely, in December of the same year Arafat argued that Palestinians were fighting not only for themselves, but for “the freedom of peoples who are fighting for their liberty and existence, the freedom of the people of Vietnam who are suffering like the people of Palestine, the freedom of all humanity from oppression, discrimination and exploitation.”83 Vietnamese and Palestinian liberation fighters thus imagined themselves as part of a larger interconnected struggle against Western imperialism, unsubordinated to Soviet expansionism. The direct impact that Vietnamese pressure on American forces in Vietnam had on American foreign policy in the Middle East is hard to quantify; however, sometimes U.S.

66 politicians inadvertently admitted that a weakening of American imperialist forces on one front benefited the national liberation struggle on the other. For example, in a 12 July 1970 television interview, U.S. Senator Stuart Symington, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Middle East, speculated that Nixon’s “hand is being forced somewhat in the Middle East as a result of our stalemate, you might say, in the Far East.”84 As much as the American administration tried to compartmentalize its foreign policy initiatives in Vietnam and Palestine, disaggregating efforts to curb Soviet influence in Southeast Asia from similar efforts in the Middle East, these struggles’ respective leaders articulated commonalities and vowed to fight on each others’ behalf. Such rhetorical and geopolitical connections that evidenced emergent Third World Liberation solidarities could also produce unintended results, however: frustrated by its defeat in Vietnam, the United States would redouble its efforts in the Middle East, anxiously proving its imperial might at the expense of Palestinian liberation. Analyzing American cultural production from 1972 to 1980, Melani McAlister argues that for the U.S. “Israel, or a certain image of Israel, came to function as a stage upon which the war in Vietnam was refought—and this time, won.”85 Attributing the U.S. defeat in Vietnam to a failure of political will, American conservatives, inspired by Israel’s brazen capture of the West Bank and Gaza during the 1967 Six Day War, asserted that the U.S. should act “not only with Israel but also like Israel on key international issues.”86 In Peace in the Middle East? Reflections on Justice and Nationhood (1974), Jewish American intellectual, prominent anti-Vietnam War activist, and stalwart supporter of Palestine, Noam Chomsky, makes a parallel, though critical, observation, suggesting that the U.S. saw Israel as a “sort of magic slate rewrite of American failure in Vietnam.”87 Although Palestinian American scholar Edward W. Said praises Chomsky’s high-profile, encyclopedic critique of U.S. and Israeli state violence, he points to a stark elision in Chomsky’s book, and in American discourse more broadly: an attention to Palestinian subjectivity. Too often American debates regarding U.S. support of Israel elide the history and agency of the Palestinian freedom fighters, let alone their solidarities with other Third World Liberation struggles around the globe. Attending to such solidarities helps to reveal a diasporic history—an alternative genealogy—of decolonial connections resistant to U.S. imperial formations and the displacements they produce.

SELF-DETERMINATION ON GUAM Disaggregating American Empire: Decolonization and Chamorro Rights on Guam As a U.S. territory—“Where America’s Day Begins”—and the host of prominent U.S. military bases—“The Tip of the Spear”—Guam was implicated in the U.S.’s imperial opposition to Vietnam and Palestine’s struggles for liberation during the Cold War period of Third World Liberation.88 During the Vietnam War specifically, Guam played a prominent role, serving as the launching pad for B-52s directed to drop bombs on Vietnam as part of Operation Arc Light (1964-1973). In March 1967—just three months before the Six Day War in Israel-Palestine—the island played host to the Guam Conference, during which President Lyndon B. Johnson met with General William Westmoreland, American Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Prime Minister of South Vietnam Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, and other prominent officials in order to strategize an end to the conflict.89 In press conferences, Johnson emphasized the goal of peace negotiations, but other news analysts—based both in the United States as well as in anti- imperialist countries such as China, Albania, and North Korea—critiqued the Guam Conference as an indicator of the war’s escalation.90 The language of one East German newspaper, Neue

67 Deutsch Zeitung, is of particular note, given its synecdochic conflation of the “Guam Conference” with the island space of “Guam,” and the ideologically specific “Northern Vietnamese forces” with the larger ethnonationalist group of “the Vietnamese”: “To the Vietnamese, Guam is a symbol of aggression because B-52 planes take off from there to strike at Vietnam. The Guam Conference is ‘war escalation council.’”91 By identifying Guam as a “symbol of aggression” to the Vietnamese people writ large, this newspaper clipping implicated “Guam” and its multiple referents—military base, Pacific island, Indigenous homeland—in the expansion of U.S. imperial aggression across the Pacific into Asia.92 That is, this rhetoric conflated U.S. military aggression with the subjectivity of the Chamorro people, positing the latter as an enemy of the Vietnamese people, regardless of political orientation. Such structural antagonisms inhibited explicit gestures of solidarity between contemporaneous decolonization struggles on Guam and in Vietnam. However, in this section I emphasize Guam’s status as not only a military outpost, but as one of the world’s longest colonies. Rather than read the Organic Act of 1950 as a step towards self-determination and self-government, Chamorro rights advocates have emphasized the continuity of Guam’s colonial status first under Spain starting in the sixteenth century, then the United States since 1898, and Japan briefly during World War II, making Guam one of the “oldest colonies in the world.”93 Although Chamorro leaders on Guam did not explicitly take up the rhetoric of Third World Liberation during the 1960-80s—and thus have not been previously discussed in relation to this movement, or to Vietnam’s and Palestine’s decolonization struggles more specifically—this historical context influenced the articulation of decolonization as a horizon of political possibility on Guam. That is, Guam’s leaders could gain inspiration from struggles for self-determination happening simultaneously around the globe. Given the specificity of Guam’s liminal status as an unincorporated territory, however— whose residents after 1950 enjoyed U.S. citizenship and most, though not all, rights protected by the U.S. constitution—“decolonization” and “self-determination” take on different forms on Guam compared to the struggles in Vietnam, Palestine, and other post-colonial spaces. As such, these terms—decolonization and self-determination—do not refer unilaterally to a struggle for national liberation in the form of Indigenous sovereignty, but rather may also refer to movements for integration (U.S. statehood), or free association (with the U.S.), depending on the historical context and the ideology of the given political actor on Guam. Indeed, even in Vietnam and Palestine, there existed and continue to exist diverse and contradictory visions of how such liberation should manifest: Communism versus democracy, Maoism versus Marxism, Palestinian Authority versus un-compromised sovereignty. Chamorro struggles for self-determination culminated in the Commonwealth Movement of the 1980s: a fight for a new political status modeled on Puerto Rico that would retain U.S. citizenship for Guam’s residents but curb federal jurisdiction. In this section, I discuss how these different articulations of decolonization on Guam unfolded during the context of Cold War politics, Third World Liberation, Pacific island self-determination, and emergent Chamorro nationalism. Following World War II and the establishment of the United Nations in 1945, which promoted the ideal of free discourse among sovereign nation-states, colonial powers sought to disentangle themselves from their cumbersome colonial possessions. Britain made plans to pull out of Mandatory Palestine, prefiguring the 1947 UN Partition Plan for Palestine that was replaced by the subsequent establishment of Israel in 1948. France hesitated to give up its rule in Indochina, spurring the Viet Minh to fight the French until 1954. Meanwhile, in 1946 President

68 Harry S. Truman, inspired by the post-war international movement for decolonization as well as a domestic civil rights agenda, included Guam on the United Nations list of non-self-governing territories, placing Guam under the purview of the UN and committing the U.S. to report regularly on Guam’s progress towards self-determination.94 In his analysis of the history leading up to Guam’s Commonwealth Movement, however, Ada observes that Guam was largely “shielded” from this “worldwide movement toward independence and decolonization,” which included decolonization struggles in Vietnam and Palestine. Guam instead was inundated by U.S policies that sought to “mold Guam in an American image” and curtail “our understanding of our rights as people.”95 As such, early post- war articulations of self-determination on Guam often took the form of demands for U.S. citizenship. According to Chamorro scholar and Indigenous rights activist Robert Underwood, Chamorros’ collective experience under Japanese occupation also largely influenced the political discourse of citizenship: The experience left a psychological legacy of fear of non-American control and helped generate a relationship of gratitude and debt as far as the Chamorros were concerned. On the one hand, there was gratitude for being rescued, but there was also a debt owed them by America on whose behalf they suffered. In keeping with this, the war experience subsequently became the main rhetorical basis for the acquisition of U.S. citizenship.96 In sum, Chamorros argued that the U.S. government owed them citizenship and constitutional rights due to Chamorros’ fierce loyalty to the U.S. during Japanese occupation. In 1950, following numerous petitions and protests, Congress offered Guam an Organic Act, which granted Chamorros U.S. citizenship but only partial constitutional protection and indefinite territorial status. Although some celebrated the Act as a victory, others soon realized the limited power granted to local leaders. In a 1986 interview, Governor Ricardo J. Bordallo reflected that the Organic Act was “not designed to enhance the dignity of the indigenous people” but rather “designed to enhance the colonial authority of the United States.”97 Dissatisfied with the provisions of the Organic Act, Chamorros continued their fight for self-determination during what Ada identifies as the “turbulent and dynamic” decades of the 1960-70s, coetaneous with the struggles for liberation in Vietnam and Palestine.98 Domestically, Chamorros protested continual military land appropriations, the Navy’s security clearance requirement which stifled Guam’s economy, and the inability to elect their own civilian governor. Internationally, they participated in the U.S.’s Vietnam War, enlisting in the U.S. military at the highest per capita rates “to fight for freedom from the perceived threat of Communism” in Vietnam “without question.”99 Ada juxtaposes Chamorros’ unquestioning loyalty to U.S. federal policy—a contrast to the anti-war protests on the mainland—with their continual betrayal by the federal government, which did not lift the Navy’s mandatory security clearance until 1962 and did not grant islanders the right to vote for their own governor until 1968. Recognizing a need to modify Guam’s political structure, in 1968 Senator Richard Taitano called for a constitutional convention to review the 1950 Organic Act. Although the Organic Act served as Guam’s de facto constitution, Congress had authored this document with no input from the people of Guam. As such, the first Guam Constitutional Convention, made up of forty-three elected delegates, sought to amend the Organic Act to better represent Guam’s interests. The delegates, many of whom were bolstered by a “strong undercurrent of Chamorro nationalism”—support for the rights of the indigenous population in particular—critiqued the federal government’s degree of control over Guam, recommending, among other points, the

69 removal of the Secretary of Interior’s oversight over Guam, just compensation for condemned lands, and the restoration of employment preferences for Chamorros for federal jobs.100 The first Guam Constitutional Convention did not directly challenge Guam’s status as an unincorporated territory though. Due to superficial media coverage and a lack of access to public information campaigns, most Chamorros were unaware of the wave of decolonization sweeping other islands in the Pacific, such as Chuuk, Pohnpei, Kosrae, Kiribati, and the Northern Mariana Islands, and therefore could not draw on these movements for inspiration. The Convention sent their recommendations to Congress in July 1970, who acknowledged receipt but made no concerted effort to address their demands. The same year, Guamanians elected their first governor, Governor Carlos G. Camacho, who promptly established a Governor’s Advisory Council on Political Status. Although initially created to resolve the debate regarding Guam’s possible reunification with the Northern Marianas—in 1969 Guam voted no while the Northern Marianas voted yes—it paved the groundwork for the 12th Guam Legislature’s Special Commission on Political Status, the first official body to address the question of Guam’s political identity. Organized in 1973 and concluded in September 1974, the Commission did not recommend a specific status, though it asserted the principle of self-determination, critiqued the existing Organic Act for not permitting the people of Guam to effectively manage their own affairs, criticized the U.S. military’s overreach in areas not affecting national security, noted the need for more local control over immigration, and called for a careful review of federal-held lands. It also recommended the development of a new Constitution to replace the Organic Act, the creation of a Joint U.S.-Guam Ad Hoc Committee to review the military’s presence on Guam, and a plan to research the implications of different political statuses for the people of Guam.101 Ada praises the work of the Special Commission as “groundbreaking” and “ahead of its time,” given the restrictive Cold War context.102 Guam’s leaders had to navigate a tense political climate shaped by American opposition to Hồ Chí Minh’s Communist revolution in Vietnam. As Senator Paul Bordallo noted: “We were politicians and didn’t want to be called Communists. We were just pro-Chamorro, but we were often called anti-American.”103 Chamorro families, many of whom had a son or daughter serving in the Vietnam War, were hesitant to critique the U.S. military, conflating support for their loved ones at war with support for the military as an institution. Furthermore, the pro-American media, including the Pacific Daily News, forcefully denied Guam’s colonial status and painted Chamorro nationalism as antithetical to the American value of multiculturalism. Such retorts denied the indigenous claim of Chamorros, who by the 1970s had become a demographic minority on their own island.104 Meanwhile, 1973 also witnessed the Treaty of Paris, in which the U.S. promised to withdraw troops from Vietnam, as well as the Yom Kippur/Ramadan War (also known as the October or Arab-Israeli War of 1973), in which a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria attacked Israeli forces on the Sinai Peninsula and in Golan Heights, territories that Israel had conquered during the Six Day War of 1967. Guam’s fight for self-determination thus unfolded during Vietnam and Palestine’s own struggles for national liberation—coeval movements that put pressure on U.S. imperial overreach from multiple spaces and angles. Indeed, it is important to note that Guam, Vietnam and Palestine were connected during this period by a multi-pronged resistance to different forms of U.S. military empire. That the decolonization struggles in each space manifested differently attests to the divergent expressions of U.S. influence at each site: territorial control in Guam, military intervention in Vietnam, and support of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine.

70 In October 1974, just six months prior to the commencement of Operation New Life—the processing of over 112,000 Vietnamese refugees accepted for parole on Guam’s military bases— Guam’s legislature invited the UN special committee on decolonization to visit Guam and confirm Guam’s continual status as a non-self-governing territory. In preparation, the PDN ran a two-page ad publicizing the 1960 UN “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples” (General Assembly Resolution 1514).105 Chamorro decolonization activists cited numerous grievances, most having to do with military appropriation of indigenous land. However, the U.S. government blocked the UN committee’s visit to Guam. During Ricky Bordallo’s second term as governor (1983-1987), Chamorro politicians and indigenous rights activists drafted the Commonwealth Act, which articulated the importance of preserving Chamorros’ language and culture, and outlined provisions for greater Chamorro control over trade, taxes, immigration, employment, transportation, and federal and military access to indigenous lands.106 In the following years, decolonization advocates and Government of Guam delegates appealed to U.S. Congress, the President, and different UN committees to meet their demands. In 1975, the year of the Fall of Saigon, the reunification of Vietnam, and the processing of Vietnamese refugees on Guam during Operation New Life, Guam’s legislature passed the Chamorro Land Trust Act, which sought to redirect public lands to native Chamorros “in the interest of preventing the people of the land from becoming landless.”107 This was a significant victory for the emerging Chamorro nationalist movement, which insisted upon the privileged importance of the indigenous rights of the Chamorro community over those of subsequent settlers. However, Guam’s political progress toward self-determination still lagged behind that of their brethren in the Northern Marianas Islands (NMI).108 In 1975, after several years of negotiation with United States, the NMI, which also hosted a significant Chamorro population, successfully negotiated a commonwealth agreement with the U.S., modeled after Puerto Rico.109 This agreement “provided a significant degree of autonomy under a locally adopted constitution, requiring ‘mutual consent’ for key self-government provisions to be modified, limiting land ownership to residents of Northern Marianas descent, delegating control of immigration, labour and tax laws to the local government and providing a US$420 million assistance package for 14 years.”110 Recall that the NMI had supported the Japanese imperialists during World War II, and that in 1969 Guam has rejected reintegration with the Chamorros of NMI, partially due to this fraught history. NMI’s successful commonwealth negotiations both angered and inspired Guam’s leaders, who felt that “their loyalty, patriotism and sacrifice [had] counted for little, while those who had aided America’s wartime enemy were rewarded with high-level US attention, comprehensive negotiations and a more honourable status in the American family.”111 Guam was forced to contend with the realization that loyalty towards the U.S. did not translate into political recognition from the U.S. Guam’s leaders renewed their fight for self-determination. The same year, Guam’s 13th Congress created a second Special Commission on the Political Status of Guam, which focused on educating the public on how key issues such as immigration, shipping rights, and land policies might be affected by different political status options. This clashed however with the plans of Guam’s Washington Delegate, Antonio Won Pat, who believed that Guam should prioritize drafting a constitution before determining Guam’s political status, and who pushed to deny the Special Commission the right to negotiate with the federal government. Despite this political in-fighting, and the Commission’s decision to focus on concrete issues rather than the more abstract status choices, in September 1976 Guam held its first political status plebiscite,

71 offering all registered voters, regardless of indigenous or settler status, a choice between Status Quo, Improved Status Quo, Independence, Statehood, and “Other.” With eighty-one percent of Guam’s eligible voters participating, fifty-one percent voted for the ambiguous “Improved Status Quo” and twenty-one percent chose “Statehood.” However, little came of the vote. Washington failed to send a reliable negotiator to Guam, and Guam’s leaders decided to focus on Won Pat’s constitution initiative. Furthermore, in subsequent years Chamorro rights activists would question the legitimacy of this plebiscite’s outcome, challenging the right of non-Chamorro settlers to vote on Guam’s political status. These settlers came to Guam under a U.S. colonial policy of immigration, and thus were often more invested in upholding the settler colonial status quo, which benefited them, than in honoring the indigenous population’s right to determine their own political future. Between 1977 and 1979, the Constitutional Convention (ConCon) dominated local politics. Authorized by a Congressional law, the ConCon was limited to “internal matters,” preventing leaders from proposing changes that would challenge federal law or modify Washington’s current political relationship to Guam. Delegates proposed a Guam Constitution that included provisions to create a municipal government and a Guam Supreme Court, and to restructure the electoral and education systems. President Carter, when presented the proposal in late April 1978, insisted that the Guam Constitution explicitly acknowledge U.S. sovereignty and the supremacy of U.S. laws. Although Guam’s leaders protested, indignant that Guam would be required to acknowledge the federal government’s supremacy even though none of the fifty states were required to do so, they eventually complied. Congress approved the Guam Constitution. When the proposal returned to Guam for a domestic vote, however, Chamorro activist groups protested heavily. They worried that Guam’s approval of the constitution would solidify U.S. sovereignty by providing it a democratic mandate, preventing consideration of alternative political options for Guam in the future. Such fears were not unfounded, given that in 1979 the U.S. actually invited the UN Special Committee on Decolonization to visit Guam, despite having blocked its visit in 1974. The U.S. argued that once a non-self-governing territory adopted a constitution, it became “self-governing,” and should thus be considered “decolonized” and removed from the UN List of Non-Self-Governing Territories. Such a designation would make it significantly harder for Chamorro rights activists to change Guam’s political status later on. The U.S. plan to have the UN witness Guam’s adoption of a constitution backfired however, due in large part to the emergence of indigenous rights organizations that led efforts to educate the public about the pitfalls of the Guam Constitution. In 1977 Robert Underwood founded the People’s Alliance for Responsible Alternatives (PARA) in protest of the PDN’s “English Only” policy. The organization, which championed Chamorro language and cultural rights more broadly, also compelled government entities to post signs in both English and Chamorro. Meanwhile, Senator Marilyn Manibusan, Tony Leon Guerrero, and Bill Colbert founded the People’s Alliance for Dignified Alternatives (PADA) to specifically campaign against the Guam Constitution. A coalition between the two produced PARA-PADA, which means “stop [the] slap” in Chamorro. The Guam Landowners Association (GLA), another grassroots organization that fought for the return of, or just compensation for, lands condemned by the U.S. government during and after World War II, also organized against the Guam Constitution. On 4 August 1979, only forty-seven percent of Guam’s electorate voted in the referendum; but of these, eighty percent rejected the Constitution. During the late 1970s, Chamorro activism and nationalism thus cohered and strengthened, creating alternative modes of

72 political participation. Notably, at least one activist, Robert Underwood, attributes his politicization partially to the mainland civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests, thus evidencing material connections between the seemingly disparate struggles.112 A condescending 1979 “White House Report No. 1 on Political Status” further galvanized calls for self-determination on Guam. First, an early draft of the White House Report, leaked at the end of August, explicitly recommended that independence and statehood be taken off the table as status options. According to the report, the former, “at least for Guam, would be so disadvantageous to the U.S. as to require resistance.”113 The latter was rejected because Guam was deemed incapable of assuming the necessary tax burden required by statehood, and because its small population would lead to questions of disproportionate representation in Congress. According to Ada, the “draft made it clear that the U.S. did not consider (or want to make) Guam a full part of the nation, but neither did it want to allow Guam to be a fully independent nation,” essentially prolonging Guam’s colonial status.114 At least two politicians, Senator Dick Taitano and Speaker Tommy Tanaka, targeted portions of the report that cited the U.S. military as the main actor obstructing Guam’s political choices. The finalized, official version of the report, although it ostensibly included a section on “statehood and independence as possible options,” was full of political contradictions, and still limited Guam’s political options. Again, Guam’s “significant importance” to the U.S. military, as the “only place in the Western Pacific where the United States maintains a forward base and early warning capabilities from U.S. soil” was cited, demonstrating that the federal government’s privileging of U.S. military interests over those of Chamorro self-determination.115 This is the same U.S. military that aggressively undermined Communist rule in Vietnam, to the point of propping up puppet regimes in the South and heavily bombing Vietnam and the surrounding countries, and that sold arms to Israel in support of the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians. By identifying a common agent of U.S. military imperialism, one can begin to identify a diasporic history of connections between struggles for decolonization in Vietnam, Palestine, and Guam. Angered by the White House Report, Governor Paul Calvo, Lieutenant Governor Joseph Ada, Speaker Thomas Tanaka, and Legislative Secretary James Underwood signed Joint Resolution 395, which condemned the Report and reaffirmed “the people of Guam’s right to self-determination.”116 The resolution is notable for its forceful, resistant language. One legislative position paper criticized the Report as nothing “more than a rose-colored viewpoint of a colonial power attempting to appease the restless natives,” while Governor Calvo pinpointed the “devastating, debilitating and distorting effect the U.S. military presence has had on the social, political and economic development of Guam since 1898.”117 Given Guam’s economic dependence on the U.S. military, its affective attachment to the institution following World War II, and high rate of enlistment amongst Chamorro families, such strong indictments of the military indicated a rise in Chamorro nationalism and a turning pointing in Guam’s politics. The resolution ends with a call for “immediate action toward commencing political status talks,” citing Article 73 of the UN Charter for support if the U.S. does not comply.118

Commonwealth Movement: Redefining Guam’s Relationship with the Federal Government Bypassing the federal government, in May 1980 Governor Calvo established the Commission on Self-Determination for the People of Guam (CSD) to determine what political status Guam’s residents desired.119 The earlier 1976 plebiscite, which resulted in a vote for “Improved Status Quo,” was deemed ambiguous and ineffective, given the former campaign’s

73 emphasis on individual issues rather than a comprehensive political status. This time, seven options were proposed—statehood, independence, free association, territorial status with the United States, commonwealth status with the United States, status quo, other—and the Commission worked diligently to educate the populace regarding the implications of each. But who constitutes the “self” of “self-determination”? Chamorro rights activists, such as the newly established Organization of People for Indigenous Rights, OPI-R (the acronym “OPI” sounds like the Chamorro word “oppe,” which means “to respond”), argued that the right to self-determination belonged solely to the Chamorro people—those who had been colonized by first Spain and then the United States, with a brief period by Japan—and not to non-Chamorro settler on Guam, who had immigrated under the U.S.’s colonial system of immigration.120 The issue was quite controversial and complicated, however, and did not align easily with stable identity categories. As Ada explains: [M]any people felt that ‘self’ referred only to the Chamorro people and many others felt that it did not. The question was important because the answer would decide who had the right to determine Guam’s political future. The opponents of Chamorro ‘self- determination’ questioned if only Chamorros had such a right, and if they did, who was Chamorro? Many Chamorros took deep offense to the question of their identity. But others insisted they were “Guamanians” not “Chamorros.” Many non-Chamorros also laid claim to being “Guamanian,” since they lived and worked and paid taxes in Guam. To complicate matters further, there were some non-Chamorros who supported the Chamorro cause, some Chamorros who rejected the cause, and some Chamorros and non- Chamorros who did not care one way or the other.121 In contemporary discourse, “Guamanian” is often used as an umbrella term to refer to all residents of Guam, both Chamorro natives and non-Chamorro settlers. However, the term actually originated in the late 1940s, following World War II, when indigenous Chamorros asked the naval government to refer to them as Guamanians.122 “Chamorro” and “Guamanian” were used interchangeably until the 1970s, when the bourgeoning Chamorro nationalist movement realigned the term “Chamorro” with indigenous rights. However, not all ethnic Chamorros privileged indigenous rights over citizenship rights, and not all indigenous rights supporters identified as Chamorro. To clarify for legal purposes, the Commission decided to define Chamorros as “all those born on Guam before August 1, 1950, and their descendants.” This definition recognized the native right of those who had resided on Guam during the Organic Act’s unilateral passage by Congress. However, others felt that 10 December 1898—the date Guam was ceded to the U.S from Spain—was more appropriate. Notably, this legal definition shied away from defining Chamorros as a distinct ethnic or cultural group, partially to avoid accusations of racial discrimination from non-Chamorro residents. In response, Chamorro rights groups protested the temporal, rather than cultural, categorization of their people. OPI-R, for example, lobbied the Guam legislature to recognize the indigenous right of self-determination, corresponded with the UN Special Committee on Decolonization, and protested the upcoming plebiscite for its failure to restrict the vote on Guam’s political status to the indigenous, colonized population. When the plebiscite was held in January 1982, all of Guam’s U.S. citizens were allowed to vote. For the first vote, only 37.2 percent of the population turned out, the plurality of which voted for commonwealth (forty-nine percent, or 4,814 votes).123 However, no option won the required majority of votes. In September 1982, Guam held a run-off election between commonwealth and the second most popular option, statehood. In the months running up to

74 election, more and more of Guam’s leaders began to promote Commonwealth as a flexible status—U.S. citizenship with more local control of trade, immigration, and land rights—that could later translate into a more permanent status of either statehood or independence. The plebiscite coincided with regular primary elections, and Guam’s voters turned out in healthy numbers. With eighty-one percent of eligible voters participating, commonwealth status won seventy-three percent of the vote (17,384 votes). The public—albeit one that included both indigenous Chamorros and non-indigenous settlers—had spoken. Guam’s leaders proceeded to promote commonwealth status as the new vision of political relations with the federal government. Over the next five years, the Second Commission on Self-Determination drafted a comprehensive Commonwealth Act, which proposed the creation of a self-governing entity, the Commonwealth of Guam, partially modeled after Puerto Rico and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). Over the course of twelve articles, the Commonwealth Act “called for mutual consent on key self-government aspects of a federal–territorial relationship, including the application of federal law to the island; provided the local government authority on immigration, labour law, Exclusive Economic Zone rights; prohibited the federal use of eminent domain power to acquire land for military bases; and required the return of excess base lands to the local government and consultation with Guam officials before major changes to force levels or base missions.”124 Guam Governor Joseph F. Ada stressed the significance of the principle of mutual consent, under which “the power of the federal government unilaterally to change our status, change agreements we arrive at, and impose unilateral federal law upon us is restricted . . . Only by giving us the right of consent can our people truly be empowered.”125 Notably, the Act recognized the Chamorro right to self-determination and promoted the preservation of Chamorro culture. A plebiscite to ratify the articles was held on 8 August 1987. With thirty-nine percent of Guam’s voters participating, ten of the twelve articles were passed. Ada notes that turnout from predominantly Chamorro villages was lower than that of other villages, and, partially as a result of this demographic bias, Article 1, which contained provisions securing Chamorro rights, and Article 7, which advocated local control of immigration, narrowly failed to acquire a majority vote.126 Rather than abandon these articles, the CSD decided to revise the wording of these articles and hold a special election in November. Activist groups such as OPI-R and “Friends of Articles 1 & 7,” in addition to Commission officials, campaigned on behalf of the amended articles. In November 1987, both articles were narrowly approved, with fifty-seven percent of voters casting their ballots.127 Although Guam’s residents voted for the Commonwealth Act, the White House never approved it, and to this day it has yet to be enacted. During the Act’s construction in 1980s, Congressional representatives pressured Guam to propose two separate bills to Congress—one with “noncontroversial” issues, and one with “controversial” ones—ostensibly in the hopes that a “noncontroversial” status would be approved, Guam could be heralded as a successfully decolonized territory, and the “controversial” issues (such as the provisions of mutual consent and Chamorro self-determination) could remain unaddressed.128 The CSD rejected such a proposal, opting to present a full document approved by Guam’s voters to Congress, rather than risk granting Congress unchecked power to edit the Act in their own favor. After Guam’s voters’ ratified the Commonwealth Act in 1987, negotiations with Congress proceeded fitfully and slowly, with each administration creating a new task force that failed to acknowledge the work of the former.

75 This chapter’s analysis of the Guam decolonization movement concludes with 1987 and the ratification of the Commonwealth Act. However, it is important to note that Guam still remains a colonized territory, and efforts to decolonize Guam are ongoing. For example, frustrated with the need to appeal to the colonial government, non-governmental groups turned to the UN for support. Starting in 1982, OPI-R sent representatives to the UN Committee on Decolonization to advocate on behalf of Chamorro self-determination. In 1988, the UN passed resolutions recognizing Chamorros’ right to self-determination and Guam’s call for a Commonwealth. The following year, the CSD members met with the UN Committee of Decolonization to discuss the Commonwealth process.129 Given the U.S.’s strong influence in the UN, however, this tactic was not always successful. In 1990, the U.S. successfully lobbied to remove a reference to the Commonwealth Act from a UN resolution, citing the issue as a matter “internal” to the U.S. and thus outside the purview of the UN.130 The U.S. also pushed to soften the UN language condemning American military bases’ obstruction of Chamorro self- determination, though this provision was rejected. Throughout the 1990s, Guam’s leaders, including Governor Ada, joined OPI-R and other non-governmental groups in presenting Guam’s case to the UN. The fight for Chamorro self-determination continues today.

POLITICAL HORIZONS Unfinished Revolutions and Entangled Temporalities Writing a diasporic history of decolonization struggles has the potential to not only influence how we understand the past but also what we can imagine as politically possible for the future. This chapter has outlined the entangled political horizons of ostensibly disparate spaces of decolonization that are connected via an asymmetric yet shared resistance to U.S. military empire. The differing relationships that the decolonization struggles in Palestine and Guam had with the Vietnamese national liberation movement during the 1967-1987 period can be accounted for by the two struggle’s differing relationships to U.S. empire: while the former’s relationship to U.S. imperialism was mediated through U.S. support for Israeli settler colonialism, the latter was absorbed as an unincorporated territory of the United States. Palestinian liberation fighters and Vietnamese anticolonial leaders, therefore, identified a common enemy in U.S. imperialism and situated their solidarity rhetoric within a global Third World Liberation movement. The struggle for self-determination of Guam, in contrast, had to contend with Guam’s incomplete incorporation into the U.S., and the subsequent debate over statehood versus free association or complete sovereignty. Today, the struggles in Palestine and on Guam continue. Given the ongoing nature of their struggles against settler colonialism, which Patrick Wolfe has identified as “a structure not an event,” both Palestine and Guam exist in a liminal political status.131 In contrast, Vietnam has seemingly concluded its own revolution: 1975 marked the end of the Vietnam War, Vietnam’s declaration of national liberation, and Communist reunification of the country. On one hand, Vietnam offers inspiration to Guam and Palestine: despite their relative lack of monetary and military resources, the Vietnamese revolutionaries were able to defeat the powerful U.S. On the other hand, the unfinished nature of Palestine and Guam’s own struggles also suggest a re-interrogation and re-opening of Vietnam’s own political revolution: a resurrection of the multiplicitous revolutionary possibilities too-soon-foreclosed by the Communist party’s own declaration of total victory in 1975. One cannot deny that Communist victory in Vietnam led to the mass displacement of refugees, most but not all of whom identified

76 as anti-Communist, as well as the marginalization of Indigenous ethnic minorities, such as the Hmong and Tay. But need national liberation necessarily reproduce the exclusions of what anthropologist Liisa H. Malkki calls the “national order of things”?132 I caution against the narratives of ideological consolidation and nationalist exclusion presumed by nation-state teleologies.133 That is, I want to propose that not only an entanglement of spaces and struggles, but also an entanglement of temporalities—the Cold War, Third World Liberation past with the neoliberal, global capitalist present—has the potential to re-chart the future political possibilities of those nation-states that have seemingly concluded their own national revolutions, such as Vietnam. To return to the Vietnam-Palestine connections discussed in the first half of this chapter: today, despite the Socialist Republic of Vietnam’s increasing diplomatic and economic relations with the State of Israel, Vietnam continues to declare its solidarity with Palestine, manifested for example in Vietnam’s participation in the UN-initiated International Year of Solidarity with the Palestine People (IYSPP) in 2014. Such rhetorical overtures are reciprocated by Saadi Salama, Ambassador of the State of Palestine in Vietnam, who studied abroad in Vietnam during the 1980s and has served as the Palestinian Ambassador to Vietnam since 2010.134 In an IYSPP speech, for example, he declared: “When in Palestine, if you say you are a Vietnamese, you will be welcome as a distinguished guest. For those in the land that is still in search of independence, the two words ‘Viet Nam’ have become a symbol of struggling spirit for the national sacred peace.”135 I argue that the “Vietnam” that Salama imagines and calls forth when he talks about Vietnam-Palestine solidarity in the present however is perhaps less the contemporary neoliberal state of Vietnam than it is the pre-1975 revolutionary ideal imaged by Hồ Chí Minh. This is a “Vietnam” associated more with what postcolonial theorist Neferti Tadiar coins the “divine sorrow” of war, oppression, and revolutionary struggle than it is with post-1975 sentiments of victory, forward progress, and capitalist development.136 Tadiar asserts the political utility of negative affects like sorrow, which connote a refusal to forget or “get over” the pain or violence of the past. According to the current Communist Party in Vietnam, 1975 marked a moment of political rupture: independence from American imperialism and the fulfillment of the late Hồ Chí Minh’s Communist plan. However, the concept of “divine sorrow” entails a rejection of this state-sponsored narrative of teleological victory—which works to silence critiques of the current Vietnamese government’s human rights abuses and curtail other political imaginaries—in favor of pre-1975 Third World Liberationist revolutionary promise. Promise here refers to the radical potentiality of multiplicitous revolutionary futures, too-soon-foreclosed by the Vietnamese state’s monopolistic consolidation of the revolution into what Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương calls a “national singular”—a narrow Communist vision that contributed to a mass exodus of Vietnamese refugees, mass imprisonment of political dissidents, and mass displacement of ethnic minorities starting in 1975.137 Therefore, rather than interpret contemporary solidarity rhetoric between Vietnam and Palestine as untimely expressions of nostalgia—connoting a political project out of time and place—I suggest we read them as “cultural resources of the living past that continue to bear radical political potentials for unfinished imaginations of revolution in the present.”138 That is, in order to draw connections between the unfinished revolution in Palestine and post-1975 Vietnam, contemporary solidarity rhetoric depends on an earlier historical moment of Vietnamese revolutionary promise, prior to Vietnam’s articulation of national liberation as a state-building project that reproduces settler colonial and exclusionary policies. It is this invocation of pre-1975 revolutionary promise in the present that suggests that it is not only Palestine’s but also Vietnam’s—and one could include

77 here also Guam’s—revolution that may actually be “unfinished,” thus opening up a space to hold the current Vietnamese government accountable to its own pre-1975 revolutionary ideals. In this I do not mean to uncritically romanticize these ideals, but rather to suggest that they do offer “cultural resources” for those hoping to historicize social justice work. Rather than reproduce nation-state exclusions, Vietnam may instead recall—remember and summon forth— the Third World Liberation movement’s legacy of decolonial, anti-racist, pro-indigenous struggle. Contemporary expressions of Third World solidarity with Palestine, and continual critiques of American empire, manifested not only in the Middle East but also in the U.S.’s own domestic territories such as Guam, would thus become moments of “critical nostalgia”: temporal entanglements that open up alternative political futures in Vietnam, as well as that chart lingering connections of political solidarity across spaces seemingly divided into a naturalized “national order.”139 Attending to such connections, in turn, necessitates a different historical methodology: a diasporic history of Vietnam, Palestine, and Guam.

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1 “Egypt, Israel Agree on Terms: Kissinger,” Pacific Daily News, 2 Sept. 1975, 1; “Palestine Guerrillas on Offensive,” Pacific Daily News, 2 Sept. 1975, 1. 2 “Palestine Guerrillas on Offensive,” 1. 3 James A. Hebert, “U.S. Marshal Injured in Violence at Asan,” Pacific Daily News, 2 Sept. 1975, 1. 4 Jana K. Lipman, “‘Give Us a Ship’: The Vietnamese Repatriate Movement on Guam, 1975,” American Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2012): 1–31. 5 Yến Lê Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 21. 6 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 6. For more about the rise of area studies during the Cold War and concerns regarding its continual relevance in the academy, see Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian (2002); The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, edited by David Szanton (2004); and Remaking Area Studies: Teaching and Learning across Asia and the Pacific, edited by Terence Wesley-Smith and Jon Goss. 7 Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents; Sunaina Maira and Magid Shihade, “Meeting Asian/Arab Studies: Thinking Race, Empire, and Zionism in the U.S.,” Journal of Asian American Studies 9, no. 2 (2006): 117–40; Junaid Rana and Diane C. Fujino, “Taking Risks, Or The Question of Palestine Solidarity and Asian American Studies,” American Quarterly 67, no. 4 (2015): 1027–37; Lisa Kahaleole Hall, “Which of These Things Is Not Like the Other: Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders Are Not Asian Americans, and All Pacific Islanders Are Not Hawaiian,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2015): 727–47. 8 Amy Kaplan, “Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, Hartford, Connecticut, October 17, 2003,” American Quarterly 56, no. 1 (2004): 12. Rabab Abdulhadi and Dana M. Olwan’s 2015 forum in American Quarterly on “Shifting Geographies of Knowledge and Power: Palestine and American Studies” does important work in centering Palestine solidarity as an important question for American Studies, though for the most part it also limits its conception of what such solidarity could look like to a binary U.S.-Palestine framework. 9 For an analogous methodology, see “Miltarized Refuge(es)” in Espiritu, Body Counts, 24–48. 10 Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire, Harvard Historical Studies 183 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 13. 11 See for example, Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational history: The Past, Present, and Future (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 12 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 13 Daniel Boyarin, Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); James Clifford, “Diasporas,” in Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994): 302-338; Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Theorizing Diaspora, edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003); Andreas Huyssen, “Diaspora and Nation: Migration into Other Pasts” New German Critique no. 88 (2003): 147- 164.

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14 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 235. 15 Espiritu, Body Counts, 21. 16 I draw from Rey Chow’s theorization of entanglements as the “fuzzing-up of conventional classificatory categories due to the collapse of neatly maintained epistemic borders,” attending to her caution that entanglements might “be about partition and disparity rather than about conjunction and similarity” (10, 2). 17 “Post-Oslo” refers to the period after the Oslo Accords. Signed in Washington, D.C. in 1993 and then in Taba in 1995, the Oslo Accords are a set of two agreements between the government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Although they did not lead to the establishment of a Palestinian State, the accords did create the Palestinian Authority, which wields limited governmental powers over the West Bank and Gaza. Many critique the Oslo Accords for normalizing Israeli occupation and selling short the promise of national liberation. For a more sustained analysis of the Oslo Accords and the response of resistant youth, see Sunaina Maira, Jil Oslo: Palestinian Hip Hop, Youth Culture, and the Youth Movement (Tadween Publishing, 2013). 18 Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Paperback ed., [Nachdr.], Religion and postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 19 A note regarding citations: much of the documents archived and anthologized by the Institute of Palestine Studies in the annual International Documents on Palestine (IDP) anthologies has been previously published. In order to credit IPS’s editorial work, to which I am indebted, I have cited both the original publication and its place in these anthologies. “Secondary literature” here refers in particular to the work of Chamberlin, Feldman, Klinghoffer, Lubin, and Nasser. 20 Joseph F. Ada, “The Quest for Commonwealth, The Quest for Change,” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 125–203. 21 Judith Apter Klinghoffer, Vietnam, Jews, and the Middle East: Unintended Consequences (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 2. 22 Klinghoffer, 2. 23 Klinghoffer, 2. 24 Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 9. 25 On May 17, 1948, the Soviet Union became the first country to legally recognize the newly- established state of Israel. However, Israel’s relations with Moscow soon deteriorated, and the Soviet Union pivoted support to the Arab nations instead, providing them with arms and military resources. During the War of Attrition (1967-1970), the Soviet Union stationed fighter pilots in Egypt, which engaged in combat with the Israeli Air Force. The Soviet Union also strongly denounced Zionism in its propaganda. 26 George W. Ball, “We Should De-escalate the Importance of Vietnam,” New York Times, 21 December 1969, 35. 27 George W. Ball, “Suez Is the Front To Watch,” New York Times, 28 June 1970, 62. 28 Klinghoffer, Vietnam, Jews, and the Middle East, 155. 29 Edward W. Said, “Chomsky and the Question of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies 4, no. 3 (Spring 1975): 97; For more on the relationship between American liberalism and Israeli

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Zionism in the 1965-1980 period, see Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 30 Ball, “Suez is the Front to Watch,” 63. 31 Ball, 63 32 Richard Nixon, “Television Interview Statements on American Middle East Policy,” National Broadcasting Company, Columbia Broadcasting System and American Broadcasting Company, transcript printed in Department of State Bulletin LXII, 27 July 1970,112-113, reprinted in International Documents on Palestine 1970, edited by Walid Khadduri, Anne R. Zahlan, Hussein Sirriyyah, George K. Nasrallah, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1973, 198. 33 Nixon, “Television Interview Statements on American Middle East Policy,” 197. 34 Ari Soffer, “Obama ‘Would Abandon Israel Just Like South Vietnam,’” Arutz Sheva, December 19, 2013, http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/175303. 35 Klinghoffer, Vietnam, Jews, and the Middle East, 70. 36 Quoted in Klinghoffer, 70. 37 Klinghoffer, 70. 38 Quoted in Klinghoffer, 70. 39 Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 33; Klinghoffer, Vietnam, Jews, and the Middle East, 71; Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 157; Pamela E. Pennock, The Rise of the Arab American Left: Activists, Allies, and Their Fight against Imperialism and Racism, 1960s-1980s (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 96. 40 Mitchell G. Bard, “U.S. Israel Strategic Cooperation: The 1968 Sale of Phantom Jets to Israel,” Jewish Virtual Library, accessed 8 July 2017, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/U.S.-Israel/phantom.html. 41 Arafat, Yasser. “Statement by the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the PLO.” United Nations General Assembly 2282nd meeting, 13 Nov. 1974. Excerpted from the provisional verbatim record, UN doc. A/PV 2282, pp. 2-51. Reprinted in International Documents on Palestine 1974, edited by Jorgen S. Nielsen and George K. Nasrallah, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1977, 134. 42 Ball, “Suez Front,” 62; Nixon, “Television Interview Statements on American Middle East Policy,” 197. 43 Ba’th Party of Syria and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, “Joint Communiqué on the Visit of a Soviet Communist Party Delegation to Syria,” Damascus, 6 Aug. 1968, printed in Al- Thawra (Damascus), 7 Aug. 1968, reprinted in International Documents on Palestine 1968, edited by Zuhair Diab, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1971, 115. 44 Soviet Union Government, “Statement Following the Israeli Attach on Karameh, Jordan,” 22 March 1968, Moscow, printed in Soviet News (London), 26 March 1968, 158-167, reprinted in International Documents on Palestine 1968, edited by Zuhair Diab, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1971, 41, emphasis added. 45 Executive Secretariat of the Afro-Asian-Latin American Peoples’ Solidarity Organization, “Appeal to all Revolutionary Forces and Socialist Countries to Support the Arab and Palestinian Peoples’ Struggle against Israel’s Aggression,” 29 May 1969, Havana, printed in Al-Ba’th

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(Damascus), 5 June 1969, reprinted in International Documents of Palestine 1969, edited by Walid Khadduri, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1972, 92. 46 See also the Statement of Policy Released by the First International Convention for the Support of the Palestinian People originally published in Al-Sha’b (Algiers), 30 Dec. 1969: “Zionism is a racialist, expansionist and colonialist system that is inseparable from world imperialism, headed by the United States. It is a tool in the hands of world imperialism, directed not only against the Palestinian people but all Arab peoples and other national liberation movements in the world as well” (qtd. in IDP 1969 853). 47 Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, “New Conference Remarks During Visit to the United Arab Republic,” 7 Feb. 1968, Cairo, printed in Al-Ahram (Cairo), 8 Feb. 1968, reprinted in International Documents on Palestine 1968, edited by Zuhair Diab, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1971, 23-25. 48 Houari Boumediene, “ Press interview statements commenting on Arab measures to secure the rights of the Palestinians granted to the Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun,” Jan. 1974, Algiers, printed in al-Shaab (Algiers), 15 Jan. 1974, translated from Arabic and reprinted in International Documents on Palestine 1974, edited by Jorgen S. Nielsen and George K. Nasrallah, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1977, 390. 49 For a more thorough critique of this binary Cold War framework, see Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 50 “U.S.-Soviet Conspiracy to Strangle Arab People’s Anti-Imperialist Struggle,” Peking Review, 14 June 1968, 25, 29, reprinted in International Documents Palestine 1968, edited by Zuhair Diab, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1971, 89. The Peking Review is known for its strong propaganda rhetoric in support of Maoism and the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” 51 “U.S.-Soviet Conspiracy to Strangle Arab People’s Anti-Imperialist Struggle,” 89-90. 52 See, for example, Interview granted by Dr. George Habash, Secretary General of the Central Committee for the PFLP, to a United Press Correspondent, 4 March 1969, Amman, printed in Al- Nahar (Beirut), 5 March 1969, reprinted in IDP 1969, pp. 630-631. 53 Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine, 59–101; Keith P. Feldman, “Representing Permanent War: Black Power’s Palestine and the End(s) of Civil Rights,” CR: New Centennial Review 8, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 193–231; Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro- Arab Political Imaginary (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 111–41. 54 “An Appeal by a Group of Black Americans Against U.S. Support for Israel,” New York Times 1 Nov. 1970, printed in Action (New York), 2 Nov. 1970, 6-7, reprinted in International Documents on Palestine 1970, edited by Walid Khadduri, Anne R. Zahlan, Hussein Sirriyyah, George K. Nasrallah, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1973, 364. 55 “Appeal,” 364. This 1970 article has received renewed attention following the recent Black Solidarity with Palestine movement. See for example http://www.blackforpalestine.com/1970- black-nyt-statement.html, Anna Isaacs’ “How The Black Lives Matter and Palestinian Movements Converged” (2016), Salim Muwakkil’s “Black Lives Matter Activists Declare Solidarity with Palestine” (2015), and Palestine Square’s “Flourishing Renewals: On Black- Palestinian Solidarity” (2015). 56 “Appeal,” 364, emphasis added. 57 “Appeals,” 365. 58 Quoted in Pennock, The Rise of the Arab American Left, 56. 59 Quoted in Pennock, 35.

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60 Quoted in Pennock, 35. 61 Naseer H. Aruri, “AAUG: A Memoir,” Arab Studies Quarterly 29 (Summer-Fall 2007): 38. 62 Pennock, The Rise of the Arab American Left, 59–60, 97. 63 Bernadine Dohrn, “Communiqué #4 from the Weatherman Underground,” San Francisco Good Times, 18 Sept. 1970, reposted on . 64 Maha Nassar, “'My Struggle Embraces Every Struggle’: Palestinians in Israel and Solidarity with Afro-Asian Liberation Movements,” Arab Studies Journal 22, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 88. 65 Samih al-Qasim, “Min al-Tha’ir fi al-Sharq,” al-Ittihad, 18 Dec. 1964, translated into English by Nassar, 90. 66 See, for example, the “1970 Resolutions of the Seventh Session of the Palestinian National Assembly,” 4 June 1970, Cairo, translated from Arabic and printed in IDP 1970, 820-826; “Joint Communiqué issued on the occasion of the PLO Executive Committee Chairman Arafat’s visit to Yugoslavia,” 30 March 1972, Belgrade, printed in Review of International Affairs (Belgrade), no. 529, 20 April 1972, 17-18, and reprinted in IDP 1972, 165; “Statement by the Palestine People’s Conference affirming the unity of the Arab and Palestine liberation movements and urging the Arab states to sever relations with Jordan,” 10 April 1972, Cairo, printed in Fateh (Damascus), no. 333, 12 April 1972, 20, translated from Arabic and reprinted in IDP 1972, 314- 317; “Communiqué issued by the Second Conference of the General Union of Palestinian Women,” 10 Aug. 1974, Beirut, printed in IDP 1974, 479-480. 67 Daoud Talhami, former official of the PFLP, Personal Interview, Ramallah, Palestine, 7 July 2016. 68 “Statement of Basic Policy of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,” Aug. 1968, printed in International Documents on Palestine 1968, edited by Zuhair Diab, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1971, 424. 69 “The Political Strategy of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,” Feb. 1969, excerpts from PFLP Pamphlet reprinted in International Documents on Palestine 1969, edited by Walid Khadduri, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1972, 610. 70 Yasser Arafat, “Press Interview Statements on Relations with Socialist States and the Proposed Democratic State in Palestine to the correspondent of the Algerian News Agency in Cairo,” June 1970, Cairo, printed in al-Sha’b (Algiers), 6 June 1970, translated from Arabic and reprinted in International Documents on Palestine 1970, edited by Walid Khadduri, Anne R. Zahlan, Hussein Sirriyyah, George K. Nasrallah, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1973, 829. 71 Talhami, Personal Interview. 72 Quoted in Chamberlin, The Global Offensive, 1. 73 “In pictures: General Vo Nguyen Giap and world leaders,” Vietnam.net, 7 Oct. 2013, accessed 30 Sept. 2016, http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/government/86140/in-pictures--general-vo- nguyen-giap-and-world-leaders.html. 74 Quoted in Chamberlin, The Global Offensive, 26. For more references to a “second Vietnam,” see also “Press Conference Statements by Executive Committee Chairman Arafat of the P.L.O. on the Situation in Jordan,” Amman, June 14, 1970, printed in al-Muharrir, 15 June 1970, Beirut, excerpts translated from Arabic and reprinted in IDP 1970, 840; and “Press Conference Statements by Secretary-General Habash of the PFLP on the Front’s attitude towards the Rogers Plan and its Acceptance by Certain Arab Governments,” 25 July 1970, Tripoli (Lebanon),

83 printed in al-Hadaf, 1 Aug. 1970, Beirut, excerpts translated from Arabic and reprinted in IDP 1970, 880. 75 “Statement of Palestinian Commando Organizations on Current Moves Aimed at ‘Liquidating’ the Palestinian Cause,” 9 Aug. 1970, Amman, printed in Fateh, 10 Aug. 1970, translated from Arabic and reprinted in International Documents on Palestine 1970, edited by Walid Khadduri, Anne R. Zahlan, Hussein Sirriyyah, George K. Nasrallah, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1973, 888. 76 Although it saw itself as a non-aligned state, Israel was not invited to the Bandung Conference, because it “had the reputation of being too beholden to the colonial powers and insufficiently driven by the dynamic on anti-colonialism.” Vijay Prashad, Namaste Sharon: Hindutva and Sharonism under US Hegemony (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2003), 13. 77 Quoted in Chamberlin, The Global Offensive, 175. 78 For more on how Palestine resonates in the global consciousness, see John Collins, “Global Palestine: A Collision for Our Time,” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 16, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 3–18. 79 “Yasser Arafat in Berlin,” Journal of Palestine Studies 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1973): 166–68. Quoted in Chamberlin, The Global Offensive, 176. 80 Hồ Chí Minh, “Message of Greeting to the International Conference for the Support of Arab Peoples,” 24 Jan. 1969, Cairo, printed in International Documents on Palestine 1969, edited by Walid Khadduri, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1972, 12. 81 Hồ Chí Minh, “Message of Greeting to the International Conference for the Support of Arab Peoples,” 12. 82 See also “Declaration by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on the Middle East Cease- Fire,”12 Aug. 1970, broadcast on Hanoi Radio, issued as an article in the official daily Nhan Dan, and printed in Free Palestine (Washington) II, 5 Sept. 1970, 6, reprinted in IDP 1970, 250- 251; and “Message from President Nguyen Huu Tho of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam to PLO Executive Committee Chairman Arafat expressing support for the Palestine revolution,” June 1974, printed in Wafa, 27 June 1974, Beirut, 1, translated from Arabic and reprinted in IDP 1974, 309-310. 83 Yasser Arafat, “Speech at the First International Conference of the Committees for Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” 27 Dec. 1969, Algiers, printed in Al-Sha’b (Algiers), 29 Dec. 1969, reprinted in International Documents on Palestine 1969, edited by Walid Khadduri, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1972, 834, emphasis added. 84 Stuart Symington, “Television Interview on U.S.-U.S.S.R. Relations and Middle East Policy,” “Face of the Nation,” Columbia Broadcasting System, 12 July 1970, St. Louis, Mo., excerpts printed in International Documents on Palestine 1970, edited by Walid Khadduri, Anne R. Zahlan, Hussein Sirriyyah, George K. Nasrallah, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1973, 215. 85 McAlister, Epic Encounters, 159. 86 McAlister, 158. 87 Said, “Chomsky and the Question of Palestine,” 93. 88 First featured in a 1964 souvenir booklet, the phrase “Where America’s Day Begins” was taken up by the Guam Visitor’s Bureau for tourism advertising. Whereas marketing in the 1970- 80s was targeted more towards Japanese tourists, in the 1960s the Bureau portrayed Guam as an American outpost. Cecilia C. T. Perez, “A Chamorro Re-Telling of ‘Liberation,’” in Kinalamten

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Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 73. 89 “President Johnson’s Trip to Guam,” 1967, Folder 12, Box 08, Douglas Pike Collection: Unit 02 - Military Operations, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, accessed 25 May 2016 http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2130812014; “Transcript Of Guam Conference,” 25 March 1967, Folder 13, Box 06, Larry Berman Collection (Presidential Archives Research), The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, accessed 25 May. 2016 http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=0240613003; Lyndon B. Johnson, “The President’s News Conference in Guam Following the Conference,” 21 March 1967, The American Presidency Project, accessed 8 July 2017, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=28153. 90 “Before Guam,” Harvard Crimson, 20 March 1967; “US Intensifies War Expansion After Guam Conference,” 1967, Folder 01, Box 09, Douglas Pike Collection: Unit 02 - Military Operations, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, accessed 25 May 2016 http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2130901028; “The Guam Conference: A Plot to Expand U.S. Aggressive War in Vietnam,” 1967, Folder 12, Box 08, Douglas Pike Collection: Unit 02 - Military Operations, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University, accessed 25 May 2016 http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2130812082. 91 Quoted in “The Guam Conference: A Plot to Expand U.S. Aggressive War in Vietnam.” 92 For more on this history, see for example Espiritu, Body Counts. 93 Lanny Thompson, Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories under U.S. Dominion after 1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2010), 13. 94 Frank Quimby, “Fortress Guåhån,” The Journal of Pacific History 46, no. 3 (2011): 359; Ada, “The Quest for Commonwealth, The Quest for Change,” 198. 95 Ada, “The Quest for Commonwealth, The Quest for Change,” 130. 96 Robert Anacletus Underwood, “American Education and the Acculturation of the Chamorros on Guam” (Unpublished Dissertation, University of Southern California, 1987), 181; quoted in Anne Perez Hattori, “Righting Civil Wrongs: Guam Congress Walkout of 1949,” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 67. 97 Bart Stinson, “Civilian Government was Born from the Organic Act in 1950,” Pacific Daily News, 9 October 1986, 4. 98 Ada, “The Quest for Commonwealth, The Quest for Change,” 132. 99 Ada, 132. 100 Ada, 132–33. 101 Ada, 138–40. 102 Ada, 140–41. 103 Quoted in Ada, 138. Paul Bordallo is the brother of Ricardo J. Bordallo, the governor who would host Operation New Life in 1975. 104 For more on the indigenous right to control immigration, see Leland Bettis, “Colonial Immigration in Guam,” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 102–18.

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105 Robert F. Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995), 250. 106 Ada, “The Quest for Commonwealth, The Quest for Change.” 107 Ada, 138. In January 2017, the Department of Justice stated that had it completed an investigation into possible violations of the Fair Housing Act by the Chamorro Land Trust Act. It is uncertain whether the federal government will follow through with a discrimination case. 108 When the U.S. liberated/reoccupied Guam from the Japanese in 1944, they also gained control of the Northern Marianas Islands. The NMI was then administered under a UN trusteeship, until its commonwealth agreement on 1975. 109 Puerto Rico negotiated commonwealth status with the U.S. in 1950. 110 Quimby, “Fortress Guåhån,” 360. 111 Quimby, 360. 112 Robert Underwood, Author’s Interview, University of Guam, 3 June 2016. 113 Quoted in Ada, “The Quest for Commonwealth, The Quest for Change,” 153. 114 Ada, 153. 115 White House Report No. 1, 1979, pg. 5, quoted in Ada, 154. 116 Joint Resolution 395, quoted in Ada, 155. 117 Quoted in Ada, 155. 118 Quoted in Ada, 156. 119 See Guam Legislative Bill 417 and Public Law 15-128. 120 Ada, “The Quest for Commonwealth, The Quest for Change,” 158–61; For more on immigration, see Bettis, “Colonial Immigration in Guam”; For more on how Filipino residents on Guam can support Chamorro self-determination, see Vicente M. Diaz, “Bye Bye Ms. American Pie: The Historical Relations Between Chamorros and Filipinos and the American Dream,” ISLA: A Journal of Micronesia Studies 3, no. 1 Rainy Season (1995): 147–60. 121 Ada, “The Quest for Commonwealth, The Quest for Change,” 159. 122 Perez, “A Chamorro Re-Telling of ‘Liberation,’” 70. 123 The results were: Commonwealth (49%), Statehood (26%), Status Quo (10%), Incorporated Territory (5%), Free Association (4%), Independence (4%), Other (2%). 124 Quimby, “Fortress Guåhån,” 364; See also Joe T. San Agustin, “The Quest for Commonwealth: ‘New Chapter in Guam’s History’’,’” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 118–24. 125 Governor Joseph F. Ada, ‘Time for Change,’ Isla: A Journal of Micronesian Studies 3, no. 1 (1995): 135. Quoted in Quimby, “Fortress Guåhån,” 364. 126 Ada, “The Quest for Commonwealth, The Quest for Change,” 167. 127 Ada, 168. 128 Ada, 162–70. 129 Ada, 200–201. 130 Ada, 201. 131 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 388. 132 Liisa H. Malkki, “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 495–523.

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133 See for example Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1990). 134 For more about Saadi Salama, see my forthcoming article in the Canadian Review of American Studies entitled “Cold War Entanglements, Third World Solidarities: Vietnam and Palestine, 1967-1975.” 135 “VN push for independence inspires Palestine,” Viet Nam News, 30 Dec. 2014, , accessed Sept. 2016. 136 Neferti X. M. Tadiar, Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 378. 137 Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương, “Articulated Sorrows: Intercolonial Imaginings and the National Singular,” Canadian Review of American Studies, forthcoming in 2018. 138 Tadiar, Things Fall Away, 378. 139 For more on “critical nostalgia,” see J. A. Brown-Rose’s Critical Nostalgia and Caribbean Migration (2009) and Ray Cashman’s “Critical Nostalgia and Material Culture in Northern Ireland” (2006).

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Part II: Tracing Passages: Archipelagos of Settler Colonialism, U.S. Empire, and Refugee Refusal

88 Chapter 3: Operation New Life: Vietnamese Refugees and U.S. Settler Militarism on Guam

On 5 April 1975, with the fall of Saigon imminent, Chamorro Governor Ricardo J. Bordallo of Guam sent a telex to President Gerald R. Ford, declaring the island’s willingness to “assist you in the nation’s effort to provide relief for the refugees and orphan children from South Vietnam.” “[T]he people of Guam,” Bordallo proclaimed, “join our fellow citizens of the United States in this highly commendable humanitarian act.”1 With these words, the tiny island in the Pacific was transformed from a U.S. military outpost set on undermining the Vietnamese Communists’ struggle for national liberation, to the U.S.’s first major processing center for South Vietnamese refugees displaced by the war. Although an unincorporated territory on the seeming outskirts of U.S. empire, over the next eight months Guam played a central role in U.S. evacuation efforts, processing over 112,000 refugees accepted for parole during what became known as Operation New Life: a name that starkly juxtaposes the co-constitutive forces of militarism and humanitarianism at play.2 While “Operation” recalls the very recent history U.S. military aggression in Vietnam—such as Operation Rolling Thunder and Operation Arc Light— “New Life” hints at the promise of rebirth for South Vietnamese refugees newly escaped from a Communist-unified Vietnam. The U.S.’s humanitarian mission was underwritten—indeed, made possible—by U.S. military occupation of the Chamorros’ island of Guåhan. Drawing from archival research at the Micronesian Area Research Center (MARC) at the University of Guam and the Nieves M. Flores Memorial Library in Hagåtña, as well as interviews conducted on Guam in summer 2016, this chapter examines the racialized contours of Operation New Life, arguing that the humanitarian rhetoric that newspapers and politicians used to describe the operation retroactively justified U.S. settler militarism on Guam, and, by extension, positioned Vietnamese refugees in an antagonistic relationship to Indigenous Chamorro decolonization efforts described in the previous chapter.3 Attending to complex relationships and quotidian encounters, I echo Catherine Lutz’s assertion that empire and its discontents “is in the details”: identifying the “many fissures, contradictions, historical particularities, and shifts in imperial processes” can “make the human and material face and frailties of imperialism more visible,” and in so doing, “make challenges to it more likely.”4 By “settler militarism,” a term coined by Juliet Nebolon, I refer to a particular manifestation of settler colonialism that indexes the centralized role of the U.S. military in appropriating Indigenous Chamorro land.5 After historicizing the rise of settler militarism on Guam, I grapple with the ambiguous racialized relationship between Indigenous Chamorros and Vietnamese refugees produced during Operation New Life. On the one hand, Vietnamese refugees were positioned as wards (albeit agential ones) of the very institution—the U.S. military—that has dispossessed Chamorros from their land since 1898. On the other hand, as Bordallo’s quote above suggests, many Chamorros empathized with the refugees’ plight, and welcomed the displaced people to their island. This chapter ends with a discussion of refugee refusal: quotidian acts of resistance, in which Vietnamese refugees subverted settler militarism expectations to cohere to a script of U.S. humanitarian rescue.

Settler Militarism: A Brief History of the U.S. Military’s Role in Land Dispossession Before describing the role that Vietnamese refugees played in upholding settler militarism on Guam during Operation New Life and its aftermath, it is important to first establish

89 a longer history of settler militarism, attending to the specificity of this particular manifestation of settler colonialism.6 According to Chamorro rights attorney Michael F. Phillips, land is “literally the base” of Chamorro culture; it “incorporates special relationships: of clan, family, religion, and beliefs.”7 In the words of Governor Bordallo: Guam is not just a piece of real estate to be exploited for its money-making potential. Above all us, Guam is the homeland of the Chamorro people. This is a fundamental, undeniable truth. We are very profoundly ‘taotao tano’—people of the land. This land, tiny as it is, belongs to us just as surely, just as inseparably, as we belong to it. No tragedy of history or declaration of conquest, no legalistic double-talk can change that fact. Guam is our legacy. Is it for sale? How can one sell a national birthright?8 Land dispossession therefore produces a “genocidal effect.”9 The U.S. military in particular— rather than the U.S. government writ large or individual non-military settler citizens—is the primary force responsible for dispossessing the indigenous Chamorro population of their native land.10 The term “settler militarism” indexes this centrality. The 1898 Treaty of Paris, which transferred Guam from Spanish to American colonial control, initiated the long, continuous process of U.S. land condemnation on Guam. In 1899, just three months after his arrival, Captain Richard P. Leary, Guam’s first American military governor, issued General Order No. 15, ordering Chamorro landowners to register their land with the U.S. Navy if they wanted their ownership to be recognized. Such orders interpolated the Indigenous population into an American system of individual private property rights that cleaved the powerful extended family clans into separate nuclear family units, undermining Chamorros’ control over indigenous land.11 According to Phillips, General Order No. 15 essentially led to mass land appropriation, because it forced Chamorros to make an impossible choice: “either register their properties accurately and lose them because they could not pay the taxes, or not register their lands and lose them because they were not properly registered.”12 Naval governors wielded executive, legislative, and judicial authority, and therefore resistant Chamorro landowners, as colonial subjects, had little legal recourse. Nonetheless, some wealthy families were able to pay the required taxes and retain their farmland, which they subsequently shared with other families in a demonstration of inafa’maolek, the Chamorro social value of being kind and good to one another and understanding oneself in relation to ones’ clan and community ties.13 Chamorros were thus able to largely uphold their traditional subsistence economy, organized around låncho (from the Spanish word rancheria), up until World War II.14 During World War II, however, American forces heavily bombed the island in order to force the Japanese occupiers to surrender, destroying Guam’s main population centers, Agana and Sumay, as well as many other villages on Guam’s western coast. About eighty percent of the island’s homes and buildings were destroyed.15 After the “Liberation” of Guam—alternatively remembered as the “Reoccupation” of the island—the Navy refused to rebuild the decimated villages and condemned huge swaths of land, occupying more than 85,000 acres: two thirds of Guam’s surface area.16 Relocated from “the Japanese concentration camps into U.S. refugee camps,” Chamorros lost their farmlands, coconut groves, and herds of cattle—in sum, the foundation of their livelihood.17 After World War II, the economy rapidly transitioned from one of subsistence agriculture to one of monetary exchange, alienating Chamorros from their land and forcing them into unskilled labor positions structured by discriminatory wage hierarchies.18 Although the Navy promised to pay rent for the condemned lands and eventually return them to their original owners, the calculated rent was way below free market value and almost none of this land was returned.19

90 Indeed, military leaders were forthright regarding their disregard for Chamorros’ prosperity. In 1945, the Commander of Naval Forces Marianas stated: “The economic development of relatively few native inhabitants should be subordinate to the real purpose for which these islands are held”: “military value” and the “welfare of the United States.”20 A year later, Colonel Louis Hugh Wilson Jr., commander of the U.S. Marine Corps, admitted the sometimes unlawful nature of indigenous land appropriation: “This is American territory and when we landed, the people were scattered and we took what we needed, occupied it, built up the roads, and so forth, irrespective of the ownership.”21 Indeed, after World War II Guam was transformed into a military fortress, serving over the years as a “launching point for strategic bombers carrying nuclear weapons,” a “base for Polaris submarines,” a “naval station with ship repair and tending capabilities,” a “communications base allowing for world-wide military communications,” and a “listening post for the tracking of Soviet submarines.”22 Within a year of the reoccupation, over twenty-one military bases were constructed on Guam.23 Even after the Guam Organic Act of 1950 officially ended Naval rule, the military still wielded control over choice beaches and fields. A day before the Organic Act went into effect, Guam’s first civilian governor, Carlton Skinner, signed a quitclaim deed transferring control over the condemned properties from Guam’s government to the United States.24 Three months later, on 31 October 1950, President Truman issued Executive Order 10178, returning all property in the quitclaim deed to the Navy, who divided the stolen land amongst the military branches without the consent of Guamanian officials or Chamorro landowners. As a result, the U.S. Navy and Air Force controlled roughly 49,600 acres, over 36 percent of the island—a decrease from the initial area of 85,000 acres, and yet still a substantial percentage.25 In a statement dated 1951, a Naval officer pointed out the terra nullius fantasies—that is, genocidal desires—of the occupying power: “Guam’s value to the United States was entirely strategic, a communications point on the way to the Philippines and east Asia. From this point of view, it would probably have been desirable if there had been no native population to complicate matters.”26 Today, the U.S. military continues to control 39,287 acres on Guam, over one third of the island’s surface area, manifesting “the highest ratio of U.S. military spending and military hardware and land takings from indigenous U.S. populations of any place on Earth.”27 We cannot talk about Guam, then, without addressing settler militarism: the “mutually-constitutive dynamic” of settler colonialism with U.S. militarism that structured Indigenous land appropriation on the island.28 Attending to the centrality of the U.S. military in Indigenous land dispossession on Guam enables us to better understand how questions of imperial power, refugee subjectivity, and settler colonialism played out in this particular space during Operation New Life.

Guam: An Unincorporated Pacific Processing Center for Vietnamese Refugees Although just 210 square miles with a 1975 population of 93,000, Guam was chosen as the first major U.S. processing center for Vietnamese refugees from 23 April to 1 November 1975, due in large part to the U.S. military’s already established settler control of large parts of the island.29 The Pacific Command representatives on Guam initially calculated that a “maximum of 13,000 people could be sheltered for a short period on Guam,” but on May 15 the number of refugees on the island awaiting transfer peaked at 50,430: an over-fifty percent increase in the population.30 Roughly 15,000 Vietnamese arrived by ship on May 7 alone, followed by another 15,000 on May 12.31 On May 13 the 100,000th refugee landed on Guam: according to contemporaneous reporting, an 11-year-old girl named Phan Truc Chi “had a lei put

91 around her neck,” was photographed for the archive, and then was rushed back “into the stream of refugees being processed and taken to Tent City.”32 In the following weeks, several thousand refugees had to be diverted to Wake Island, another unincorporated U.S. territory in the Pacific.33 The U.S. military set up three main camps on Guam to house the refugees—“Tent City” at Orote Point (an abandoned World War II airstrip, which at its peak housed 39,331 refugees), Asan Annex34 (a former hospital complex used during the Vietnam War that consisted of seventeen two-story metal buildings), and “Tin City” at Andersen Air Force Base (a group of corrugated metal buildings)—as well as six smaller camps at different military sites across the island—the Naval Air Station, the Naval Communications Station in Barrigada, the Bachelors’ Civilian Quarters in Apra Heights, the Naval Station gym, the Seabee Masdelco Sports Arena, and MINRON near Polaris Point. Private companies such as J & G Enterprises, Black Construction Co., Hawaiian Dredging Co., and the (recently closed) Tokyu Hotel also housed hundreds of refugees during the Operation’s height.35 Guam’s history of settler militarism laid the groundwork for establishing the island as the U.S.’s first major processing center for Vietnamese refugees.36 First, because Guam is a U.S. territory, a military colony, no Status of Force Agreement (SOFA) regulates U.S. forces on Guam and their effect on the land and sea. Second, Guam’s geographical proximity to Vietnam specifically, as the U.S.’s most westward territory, facilitated the short transport of refugees to U.S. soil in 1975. During the Vietnam War, this proximity marked Guam’s U.S. bases as strategic points of military offensive, giving credence to Guam’s label as the “Tip of the Spear” of the “U.S. war machine.”37 Naval Air Station Agana provided support for carried base aircraft used in the war, and the Naval Hospital treated many wounded American soldiers.38 In April 1964, the U.S. military first deployed B-52s to Guam, and on 18 June 1964, it launched the first thirty bombers from Andersen Air Force Base, initiating Operation Arc Light.39 Over the next eight years of the operation, tons of bombs were unloaded at the Naval Station at Apra Harbor, stored at the Naval Magazine on the southern part of the island, and then driven north to Andersen Air Force Base each day to be loaded onto the B-52s headed for Vietnam.40 Guamanians remember the militarized environment: large flatbeds transferring the 500-pound bombs shook the island’s roads, and the loud B-52s heading for Vietnam pierced the tropical skyline all hours of the day.41 The base population swelled past 15,000, and by December 1972, Andersen AFB hosted more than 150 B-52s.42 The operation climaxed with President Nixon’s infamous “Christmas Bombing,” during with 729 sorties carrying 20,000 tons of bombs that allegedly killed 1,600 North Vietnamese civilians were launched from Andersen AFB over the course of an eleven-day period. Just thirty days later, the northern Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), the southern Republic of Vietnam (RVN), the United States, and the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) signed the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, which on paper ended direct U.S. combat in Vietnam but which failed to secure ratification by the U.S. Senate. During the Vietnam War, Guamanians suffered the highest per capita rate of casualties: over 70 Guamanians, most of native Chamorro descent, died in Vietnam fighting America’s war.43 Today, Guam continues to have the highest per capita rate of enrollment into the U.S. military.44 Third, unlike American citizens on the mainland or the sovereign Filipino government, unincorporated citizens of Guam could not refuse President Ford’s orders to host Operation New Life. Due to high rates of unemployment and the unpopularity of the controversial Vietnam War, Americans on the mainland strongly protested the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees deemed unassimilable aliens or potential Communist infiltrators.45 According to a May 1975

92 Gallup Poll, 54% of all Americans were opposed to admitting Vietnamese refugees, and only 36% were in favor.46 A couple weeks after the commencement of Operation New Life, the U.S. established four mainland refugee reception centers for those who had already been vetted in the Pacific: Fort Chaffee Army Base in Arkansas, Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base in California, Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, and later Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania. However, even these “militarized refuges” received virulent push-back: a placard in Arkansas read “Gooks, go home” and Representative Burt L. Talcott (CA-R.) gave voice to a feeling in his district that “damn it, we have too many Orientals.”47 A journalist reporting from Fort Indiantown Gap wrote that “Asians are about as welcome in some of the small towns surrounding the nation’s newest refugee center as blacks might be at Ku Klux Klan gatherings.”48 On the other side of the Pacific, a tent city adjacent to the Bamboo Bowl sports stadium at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines temporarily housed over 30,000 refugees during spring 1975. However, on 23 April 1975, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos announced that his country would no longer accept political refugees.49 Given the new balance of power following the Communist victory in Vietnam, the Marcos regime feared that harboring South Vietnamese government and military officials would jeopardize their new potential ally-ship with North Vietnam.50 That very same day, the U.S. pivoted the main refugee processing center from the Philippines to Guam, though State Department spokesman Robert Anderson “denied that the switch had anything to do with objections from the Philippine government.”51 The first planeload of refugees landed at Anderson Air Force Base at 4:01pm.52 Although many Guamanians embraced the opportunity to serve in Operation New Life—offering to adopt and sponsor refugees, as well as donate their time as babysitters and cooks—others expressed fear of food shortages and overcrowding.53 Because Guam’s residents were neither fully incorporated into the U.S. nor independently sovereign, however, they had little say in the matter, remaining precariously subject to the federal government’s plenary powers.54 Indeed, the “colonial status of Guam” was actually a “precondition” for its choice as a site that “the US mobilized for use in refugee operations.”55

Operation New Life: Humanitarianism as a Justification for Settler Militarism Operation New Life manifested a particular confluence of militarism and humanitarianism, the latter of which helped to retroactively humanize and justify centuries of U.S. settler militarism on Guam, and, by extension, position Vietnamese refugees in an antagonistic relationship to contemporaneous Indigenous Chamorro struggles for decolonization.56 Most American accounts of Operation New Life praise the “tremendous compassion” of the U.S. military personnel who worked long shifts—sometimes up to 24 hours—to shelter and feed the Vietnamese refugees.57 Pacific Daily News reporter Paul Miller wrote that “one of the many things in which Americans can take pride these days is the performance of our military in flying endangered thousands out of Vietnam and caring for them in hastily built staging areas such as the U.S. territory of Guam.”58 In a May 10 article chronicling the efforts of the U.S. Construction Battalion (more commonly referred to as CBs or “Seabees”) to hastily clear 500 acres of tangan-tangan trees to set up 3,200 tents, 191 wooden toilets, and 300 showers at Orote Point to house up to 50,000 incoming refugees, Honolulu Star Bulletin writer Lyle Nelson described the “Phoenix quality” of the operation, characterizing it as a “rebirth for [the Seabees’] efforts for the Vietnamese people and a symbolic windup to 13 years of sweat (and some blood).”59

93 Building on the work of Jana K. Lipman, Ayako Saraha, and Heather Marie Stur, I argue that these humanizing narratives of Phoenix-like rebirth overwrote the U.S. military’s role as an imperial aggressor during the Vietnam War.60 According to Yen Lê Espiritu, this “material and ideological conversion of U.S. military bases into places of refuge—places that were meant to resolve the refugee crisis, promising peace and protection—discursively transformed the United States from a violent aggressor in Vietnam to a benevolent rescuer of its people.”61 By invoking the terms “conversion” and “transform[ation],” however, one should not disaggregate the U.S.’s roles as “violent aggressor”/ “benevolent rescuer.” Rather, the rescue/inclusion of Vietnamese refugees is co-constitutive of the displacement/exclusion of Indigenous Chamorro people, and the “conversion” of U.S. military bases on Guam into “places of refuge” for Vietnamese refugees did not preclude the continual role these bases played in furthering U.S. imperial aggression in the Asian Pacific.62 Indeed, these humanizing narratives work to retroactively justify U.S. militarism in the Pacific during the Vietnam War as well as proactively validate increased military buildup on Guam in subsequent years. By invoking the humanitarian role of the U.S. military during Operation New Life—without which, it was implied, the Vietnamese refugees would have perished—settler militarism asserts the need for a U.S. military outpost on Guam. The humanitarian actions of the U.S. military seemingly outweigh its violent wars of imperial aggression. The temporal repercussions of this rhetoric reverberate both backwards into the past as well as forwards into the future, overwriting the unjust dispossession of Indigenous Chamorros with a celebratory narrative of U.S. humanitarian rescue—ignoring the role of the U.S. military in displacing the Vietnamese refugees from their homes in the first place, and interpellating the displaced Vietnamese as refugee settlers antagonistic to Chamorro decolonization.63 It is not surprising then that some Chamorros voiced critiques of Operation New Life. Several of Guam’s legislators—many of whom self-identified as Chamorro—protested the use of Guam as a processing center during Operation New Life, noting potential food and housing shortages, public health conditions, the possible inadequacy of federal funds to reimburse local transport and labor costs, and the uncertainty of tens of thousands of Vietnamese parolees staying on Guam instead of transferring to the mainland, indefinitely straining the small island’s resources during the contemporaneous economic recession.64 Although some of these complaints can be attributed to party politics—Republican senators protesting the seemingly unilateral decisions of their Democratic governor—the protests are noteworthy for implicating U.S. military colonialism in their accusations. Republican Senator Ricky Salas for example said, “I felt it was always their plan to leave people on Guam. Kissinger and the representatives from defense will deceive the people of Guam again. That is the reason the U.S. cannot be believed all over the world. We can’t believe the leaders of our nation.”65 He further accused the State Department of being “willing to sacrifice us on Guam to protect those citizens on the Mainland who don’t want permanent resident aliens.” Likewise, Republican Senator Jerry Rivera declared, “[F]ederal officials may be thinking that it is easier to handle the protests of Guam rather than the protests of the 50 states,” further highlighting the unequal weight of Guamanians’ voices in the U.S.’s representative democracy.66 Importantly, Vietnamese refugees here become metonymies of federal overreach and exploitation: in contrast to the racialized anti-refugee sentiments expressed on the mainland, Guam’s representatives implicated Vietnamese refugees in their larger condemnation of U.S. imperial power. However, the racial antagonisms created to uphold U.S. settler militarism on Guam—that is, the pitting of Vietnamese refugees hosted by the U.S. military against Chamorro self-

94 determination efforts to challenge that same military’s settler control—are inherently unstable, and they break down in the inherent complexity of on-the-ground racial encounters.67 It is too simplistic to declare Operation New Life a unilateral settler militarist imposition. Many Guamanians, including native Chamorros, sympathized with the plight of the refugees and sought to help with the asylum efforts, volunteering labor and donating clothing and toys to the new arrivals.68 Norman Sweet, senior coordinator with the Agency for International Development (AID) refugee task force, observed that the “hospitable” people of Guam “show genuine interest in the welfare” of the refugees.”69 Even President Ford commended the Guamanians’ “warm and outgoing response,” upholding the island’s residents as an “outstanding example to other Americans and the rest of the world in meeting an international emergency.”70 Rather than dismiss these actions as examples of false consciousness—settler militarism recruiting Chamorro affective labor in order to further validate the ongoing military occupation of Guam—one should take seriously these radical acts of empathetic hospitality. Even though decolonization efforts remain critical of colonial settlers, which include refugee settlers, Chamorros also recognized the plight of Vietnamese refugees in need of temporary asylum. Older Chamorros drew comparisons between the experiences of the war-shocked refugees and their own World War II experiences under Japanese occupation, associating the Communist regime in Vietnam with the imperial Japanese occupiers. In a slightly different vein, Jesus Quitugua Charfauros, a retired Chamorro Naval Radioman Chief (RMC) who lived on Guam during Operation New Life, compared the Japanese occupiers instead to the U.S. military, given the military’s role in interning the refugees in isolated camps.71 As the telex that opened this chapter reveals, Governor Bordallo actually volunteered Guam as a staging site for refugee processing, weeks before President Ford demanded Guam’s assistance. This is not to suggest that Bordallo was a puppet of U.S. settler militarism. On the contrary: in 1974 Bordallo ran his grassroots, patronage-based campaign for the Democratic ticket on a popular platform of Chamorro rights, articulated in both English and Chamorro.72 Although his inaugural address seemingly embraced the U.S. military—“You are a vital part of Guam. We welcome your valuable contributions to the growth of our island. You have our cooperation in all endeavors which are of mutual interest to our country and this territory”— Bordallo also declared “protecting the people’s sovereignty over the resources and affairs of the island” a top priory of his administration, since Chamorros had “already paid dearly by accommodating the U.S. military’s huge appetite for land” in Guam.73 Los Angeles Times reporter David Lamb described Bordallo’s attitude toward the military as “cool but accommodating.”74 Rather than read Bordallo’s comments regarding Chamorro rights and Operation New Life as contradictory, I suggest that we disaggregate articulations of Chamorro self-determination from those of U.S. military opposition. Chamorros fought—and continue to fight—for the right to determine when, how, and to whom they open their island home. An embrace of displaced Vietnamese refugees need not necessarily imply an embrace of the military institution that hosted them. Indeed, Chamorros’ desire to aid Vietnamese refugees does not automatically signify acquiescence to the U.S. military’s continual destruction of and encroachment upon Indigenous land. Although many Chamorros genuinely welcomed the opportunity to participate in Operation New Life, they did not sanction the use of Agent Orange on Guam’s military bases during the Vietnam War or the spraying of the pesticide malathion to kill mosquitoes to reduce malaria and dengue fever outbreaks during the operation—toxins which seeped into the environment and allegedly tainted civilian water sources.75 Agent Orange posed a threat to

95 Guamanians and other Micronesians even in its destruction: following the Vietnam War, in September 1977 the Air Force decided to incinerate of the remaining herbicide off the coast of Johnston Island in Operation PACER HO, risking the contamination of the Pacific Ocean.76 In his critique of the plan, Tony Hodges, Environmental Protection Board member of the Trust Territories, pointed out: “‘If it’s so safe I would suggest that the disposal be carried out in the courtyard of the inner ring of the Pentagon. . . . The people who manufacture this material and use it should take the risk, not the people of Micronesia.’”77 Settler militarism thus affects both native Chamorros and Vietnamese refugees, albeit asymmetrically. The U.S. military colonized and contaminated islands in the Pacific in order to counter decolonization struggles in Southeast Asia and displace hundreds of thousands of refugees. Chamorros’ acts of hospitality towards the Vietnamese refugees during Operation New Life risked rhetorical appropriation by the structure of settler militarism, which conflated hospitality towards the refugees with Indigenous acceptance of toxic contamination and land dispossession. Only by challenging this conflation can we recognize radical acts of empathy between native Chamorros and Vietnamese refugees. Such acts offer one way past the impasse of settler militarism. That is, Indigenous resistance to settler militarism need not manifest as a rejection of refugees—who risk reproducing the structural position of settler—in need of care. Chamorros were not the only ones to challenge the dominant rhetoric of settler militarism however. Vietnamese refugees also subverted settler militarist attempts to fix them in the role of the “grateful refugee.”78

Refugee Subjectivity, Sociality, and Refusal: Negotiating Gold, Food, and Family Vietnamese refugees were agential subjects who made the most of their political condition, undermining attempts by the U.S. military to recruit them for the project of settler militarism via a narrative of humanitarian rescue. In contrast to previous refugee studies which have focused on the biopolitical and necropolitical control of the camps or the abject, helpless, and demoralized state of the refugees, I attend to the “politics of living”: “how Vietnamese refugees, as devalued people, scripted new life histories—and indeed new lives—on the margins of sovereign space.”79 This section cites heavily from Guam’s newspaper, the Pacific Daily News (PDN). Although centering a Guamanian perspective, the newspaper does depict the Vietnamese refugees’ more everyday experiences: some English-speaking refugees were interviewed for the newspaper, some wrote letters to the editors, and we can read against the grain of the non-Vietnamese authored articles to recuperate traces of refugee subjectivity. A Vietnamese language newspaper, Chân Trời Mới (New Horizons), also circulated throughout the camps with the help of PDN editors. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben theorizes “the camp” as “a space where camp dwellers are placed in a lingering state of ‘bare life,’ stripped of juridical protections and reduced to a biological minimum but not declared dead or outside the rule of law.”80 Severed from politics, “bare life” is a sacred life “that can be killed but not sacrificed,” a non-threatening “object of aid and protection.”81 Within this framework, the refugee risks becoming a passive recipient of humanitarianism: granted enough sustenance to live, but denied political participation in society. The refugee is rendered apolitical and voiceless: an object acted upon rather than an acting subject. Agamben’s critique is important for calling attention to the ways in which sovereign powers could strip camp dwellers of their political vitality. However his insights, derived from an analysis of the Nazi death camps during the Holocaust, should not be naively extrapolated

96 without attending to the historical specificity of other manifestations of “the camp.” Unlike the detention centers and closed camps that would appear in Southeast Asia in subsequent years to house the unanticipated mass outflow of boat refugees during the 1980-90s—many of whom would remain stuck in legal limbo as protracted refugees for years or even decades—the Operation New Life camps on Guam were relatively better resourced and structured for shorter stays.82 Furthermore, this first wave of refugees consisted primarily of those who had connections to the U.S. military and government: South Vietnamese military officials, the political elite, those who worked for the American embassy or American businesses, and their families and loved ones. As a result, the Vietnamese refugees who were processed on Guam were on average wealthier, better educated, and better connected—and therefore better positioned to negotiate their agency in the camps—than successive waves of forced migration from the region. Moreover, sovereign power is never complete power. Although the U.S. military controlled the mobility, sustenance, and political status of the Vietnamese refugees, the refugees still found ways to undermine and subvert military power via quotidian acts of survival. This first wave of Vietnamese refugees upended American stereotypes of the refugee as a poor, destitute, and malnourished figure—a figure prone to recuperation as an object of humanitarian aid. Many PDN articles fixate on the “well-dressed” status of the refugees— “Some of the women were wearing diamond rings” and “Several old women carried parasols to keep the hot sun off”—as well as the their unexpected wealth—“Rumors about refugees carrying ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars’ are widespread.”83 Many refugees indeed brought large percentages of their life savings to Guam via gold taels, rectangular one-ounce packs containing 2.5 pieces of wafer-thin bars of 24-karat gold, that were sewn into their clothes and packed into their bags; once word got out, companies such as Deak & Company, American Savings and Loan Association, and Bank of America flocked to the camps, setting up “little wooden building[s] amid the tents” to purchase the gold in exchange for savings accounts.84 For several months in 1975, the refugee camps on Guam hosted “the most active gold exchange house in the world,” the “biggest gold rush in recent times,” which amounted to “millions of dollars in gold wafers.”85 Indeed, “[i]ndividual sales of up to $400,000” were “not uncommon.” Although selling their gold freed the refugees from having to worry about theft inside the camps, some companies were accused of profiting off of the refugees’ plight, prompting Guam’s government to step in to regulate the gold prices.86 Sometimes the refugees’ deviation from the stereotype of a destitute victim prompted some Guamanians to question whether these people were even deserving of American care, thus jeopardizing the refugees’ precarious status as wards of the U.S. military. For example, in a Letter to the PDN Editor dated 1 May 1975, Betty L. Johnson, a self-identified U.S. Navy dependent, wrote: Don’t get me wrong, I don’t begrudge the people help if they really need it, but just take a look at the pictures in the April 24 edition of the PDN. They don’t look like refugees to me. Look at the clothes, the rings, watches etc. on these people. Look at the picture of all the baggage, people who can afford to buy suitcases like that certainly in my book cannot be classified as refugees. They say a picture is worth a thousand words so just take some good long looks at these pictures and tell me truthfully that these people are in need of food and clothing.87 Who has the power to judge who “looks” like a refugee, and who doesn’t? Previous studies have critiqued the ways in which displaced persons from Vietnam have had to perform a particular anti-communist narrative in order to be considered legitimate refugees worthy of American

97 absorption.88 In this particular passage, Johnson mistakenly conflates the problems of class status and political displacement; despite the refugees’ material wealth, they were unable to purchase their political security in the fallen state of South Vietnam. Such a unilateral and ahistorical focus on class papers over the role that French colonization and American imperial aggression played in destabilizing the refugees’ homeland in the first place. Johnson goes on to say that the U.S. should instead divert some of the resources spent on Operation New Life to “our own people,” those “US citizens that are needy.”89 However, Johnson misdiagnoses the primary thief of those resources: the bloated U.S. military who initiated wars of imperial aggression in Asia, not the refugees displaced by that very aggression, regardless of their former class status. Furthermore, despite her care to distinguish between worthy and non-worthy refugees from Vietnam, Johnson reveals her nativist anxieties regarding all racialized refugees: “What will happen when all these ‘refugees’ get into the United States and try to take it over?”90 This letter thus demonstrates the shortcomings of an over-simplified class analysis underwritten by Orientalist fantasies of yellow peril. By racializing the Vietnamese refugees as such, Johnson unwittingly interpolates them into a longer history of American fears about Asian immigrants.91 In spite of the concerns of Guamanians like Johnson, the U.S. military actually spent millions of tax dollars to fund the refugees’ stay on Guam, and one of their main expenses was food. For example, over the course of one month (24 April to 24 May 1975), the refugees housed at Orote Point’s Tent City alone ate “some $1.6 million worth of food”: roughly “$63,870” per day, or about “$2 a day per refugee.” In late May, this constituted about “52,000 pounds of ham, pork chops, canned meat, rice, milk, eggs, and fruit.”92 Food studies scholars have argued that control over food distribution is its own form of biopolitics: in this case, refugees are subject to the U.S. military’s power to decide when and what to serve, and are thus vulnerable to the military’s hold over their very access to bodily sustenance.93 Although this analysis is important, I instead want to highlight the ways in which the refugees put pressure on the U.S. military to meet their culinary demands. One of the biggest grievances refugees had about the camps was in regards to food. Although military personnel kept the kitchens running for twenty-four hours a day, the food lines stretched for hours, especially during the first weeks of logistical confusion. According to twenty-six year old Minh Luong Ngoc, a former security guard for the American Consulate at Cần Thơ, life on Guam consisted of “getting up, standing in long lines for breakfast, eating fast, resting, standing in line for lunch, resting and standing in line for dinner.”94 Even Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison, commander of U.S. Naval forces on Guam, admitted that “[o]ur worst problem is too many people standing in line for food.”95 The refugees also rejected the heavy American canned goods, complaining about the inadequate supply of rice, chopsticks, Vietnamese spices, and fresh vegetables.96 Rather than follow the script of the destitute refugee grateful for humanitarian rescue, these individuals demanded that the U.S. military accommodate their culturally specific palate preferences.97 As a result, the Navy ordered “100,000 chopsticks” from Japan; diverted “500 tons of rice” to Guam from “a ship bound for other Far East destinations”; and started placing “fish sauce, dried curry powder, coconut cream, bamboo shoots, greens and dried beef and pork” on “most tables”— what one journalist termed a “‘Vietnamizing’” of the food.98 The refugees were less successful in acquiring fresh leafy greens, though this lack of success should not be attributed to a lack of effort or argumentation. Dr. Ronald Klimek, a white social scientist conducting research on “what the Vietnamese were like at the time of their immigration to America,” recalls: The refugees complained repeatedly that they were not being given vegetables and that the portions of meat and rice were more than they needed. They wanted vegetables, as

98 they defined them [not the American-given legumes], substituted for meat. They argued that vegetables are cheaper than meat and that here was a chance for them to get what they wanted while the government saved money. I had a number of evening parties for the Vietnamese who helped me conduct research. I always asked them what kind of festivities they wanted and the response always was the same—vegetable parties. I brought boxes of fresh vegetables—mostly lettuce, tomatoes and green peppers—and the Vietnamese quickly chopped and sliced the food for what turned out to be vegetable orgies.99 Orientalist, sexualizing rhetoric aside, this anecdote evidences the ways in which the Vietnamese negotiated quick-wittedly with the U.S. military to accommodate their requests. That they were unsuccessful in acquiring fresh vegetables is less a symptom of the failure of their efforts, than an indication of the general difficulty of shipping large quantities of perishable produce to an island whose own domestic agriculture had been devastated by years of Spanish colonialism, Japanese occupation, American settler militarism, and unpredictable typhoons.100 Food also became one of the main commodities of the black market connecting Vietnamese refugees, Guamanian civilians, and U.S. military personnel that allegedly sprung up in Tent City. Although an official Navy spokesman attested that there “have been no reports of black marketeering” and only “two reports of prostitution,” a PDN journalist’s interview with Army cook Brander and his anonymous friend “Jelly” suggests a different story.101 According to Brander and Jelly, the “transactions usually begin when a refugee makes a deal with a mess attendant.” Then at night, the “attendant ‘accidently’ will miss the bus that transports him from the camp, then meet the refugees at designated tents and begin selling the materials to them.” Refugees kept the materials that they coveted for themselves, but sold the American foods that they disliked, such as “‘ham, hash or tuna,’” to civilians at a mark-up. They also sometimes sold fresh produce to the civilians, which was and continues to be in short supply on the island due in part to the historic destruction the Chamorros’ agricultural economy to clear way for the U.S. military base.102 Brander and Jelly attest that “[a]nything the Vietnamese want” can be “bought through the Army.” Sometimes, however, “‘sexual favors’” rather than money is the medium of exchange: “Jelly said that when an attractive Vietnamese girl asks for a can of meat or some other type of food she often ‘pays’ for it by sexual ‘favors’ for the person she asks,” and Brander recalled that “he and three other mess cooks were given five hours of extra duty for accidently interrupting a staff sergeant during intercourse with a refugee who wanted food.” These anecdotes remind us that refugee agency is of course limited and constrained by the imperial, racial, and sexual power dynamics structuring the camps, as well as gesture towards the underlying truth of Betty L. Johnson’s comments above: refugees were indeed given more food and resources than some civilians on Guam, who were so desperate to access this military- granted boon that they resorted to black market dealings. The fact that Guamanians had to go through Vietnamese refugees to indirectly access federally funded food speaks volumes to Guam’s status as an unincorporated territory. Since food was such a large preoccupation for the refugees during Operation New Life, it is unsurprising that the topic is prominently resurrected in present-day oral histories and memories of the operation. For example, in a June 2016 interview, one refugee recalled an experience of walking back to the tent in the rain with her family with their paper plates of food, acquired after long hours of standing in line, only to have the plates disintegrate in the downpour, their food ruined.103 Another refugee who didn’t go through Operation New Life herself shared

99 her older sister’s memory of watching Vietnamese fishermen catch fish in the ocean bordering Camp Asan and bringing the fish back to the camp to the great cheer of the other refugees.104 Acquiring food on their own, Vietnamese refugees subverted the U.S. military’s ability to exercise total control of their means of subsistence. Newspaper accounts of Operation New Life also evidence many examples of refugees taking (limited) control of their forms of social organization. Negotiating American preferences for nuclear family formations, for example, refugees stretched the defintion of family to ensure the safe passage of as many individuals as possible. One man, claimed twenty-eight children as “his ‘very own’” to immigration officials (even though he had to “check the[ir] name tags” before “he could fill out the entry forms”).105 Another couple “explained to immigration authorities that the baby they carried had been found in an abandoned field on their way to the airport and they ‘just couldn’t leave him there.’”106 Sometimes refugees were accused of “fraud” for “adding names to family registers.”107 On the other hand, they successfully changed the immigration laws restricting entrance into the U.S.: during Operation New Life, the category of “families” of U.S. citizens and permanent-resident aliens who were allowed entry was expanded to include “aunts, uncles, cousins, etc., on both sides of family.”108 The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) even considered “‘admitting these persons’ longtime domestic help,’” further qualifying what constitutes a legitimate “blood relationship” in the eyes of the U.S. government.109 Refugees also upended American expectations regarding romance and intimacy. In one of the most well-documented, “tear-jerking drama[s]” of the Operation, chronicled breathtakingly on the front pages of the PDN, Thomas Heijl—a “brown-haired, wiry Farmingdale, N.Y., resident” who had been stationed at Nha Trang Air Base as an Air Force mechanic in 1971—reunited with his fiancée, Nguyen Thi Ut, at Asan Annex and finally married her (in the camp, with Governor Bordallo himself presiding) after three years of separation and the tragic loss of their daughter, Linda, who “was killed by Viet Cong bullets as she and her mother were waiting on the Vietnam coast to be picked up by a fishing boat”—only to find out later that the “cousin” Ut insisted that Hejl sponsor and bring with them to New York was in fact Ut’s Vietnamese lover, Tran Mong.110 Ut ended up leaving Hejl after a couple months to go live with Mong “in a motel in Florida.”111 Although one may sympathize with Hejl and his plight, I share this example to evidence the ways in which refugees creatively worked with the limited means given to them to gain safe passage for themselves and their loved ones. Refugees also took leadership positions in the camps, at times taking “much work from their hosts, the U.S. Navy.”112 At the Naval Communications Stations (NCS) Barrigada barracks, one of the smaller camps, the Vietnamese set up a plan to “work for themselves,” “performing most of the cooking, cleaning, medical duties as well as setting up lines of communications to help other refugees through the lengthy paperwork process needed by U.S. immigration officials” and “teaching English.” The Vietnamese “camp commander,” Tran Khanh Van, “who holds a doctorate in civil engineering from University of California at Berkeley,” formed “intracamp committees” for sanitation, health, the kitchen, and information. According to Dr. Van, “We are well-organized because there are better facilities here.” The PDN journalist reported that as a result of the intracamp committees, the refugees’ “stay has been a comfortable one.” The larger Asan Annex camp also elected a “commanding officer,” Tony Lam, a bilingual, “extroverted,” “5-foot-4 North Vietnamese native” and “former mahjong partner of Gen. Nguyen Cao Ky,” who greeted flustered new arrivals, directed families to their tents, helped organize cleaning and sanitation committees, met with U.S. military officials,

100 comforted homesick refugees, arbitrated conflicts, and interpreted during immigration interviews, “scurrying from one scene to another, advising here and mediating there,” in what often amounted to a 20-hour work day.113 For the Fourth of July celebrations organized at Camp Asan, Lam “eagerly directed” the games and contests, which included “[s]ack races, slow-speed bicycle races, a tug-of-war, a beauty pageant, and a fishing contest,” combined with other activities such as a volleyball tournament, special movies, and an evening dance.114 Colonel General Jinx McCain, the Marine officer in charge of the camp, interpreted the Vietnamese refugees’ participation in the festivities as proof of their American patriotism, remarking in praise: “The patriotism shown here today was stronger than that in 75 percent of the cities back in the States.” Another onlooker observed, “The refugees brought out the red, white and blue of the American flag.” Although many refugees indeed probably felt a genuine desire to celebrate the patriotic holiday of the country that had fought alongside them during the Vietnam War and that was about to absorb them, others probably just appreciated a break in the normal routine, which included long stretches of waiting and boredom.115 While Tony Lam was definitely the star of the “national and international media,” as evidenced by the relatively prominent PDN article lamenting his decision to finally leave and go to California after “90 days of volunteer management,” others at Asan Annex organized “Asan Refugee Camp Security,” which consisted of a “commander, an assistant and 10 team leaders or supervisors” who then recruited “10 volunteers for security work.”116 Unwilling to trust the Navy with something so important as their security, the organization sought “to keep South Vietnamese from leaving the camp, to keep unauthorized outsiders from entering it, to protect and control the barracks compound, to prevent children from going to the beach and possibly drowning and to provide barrack sentries at night.” Using “five walkie-talkie radios” to communicate, the team patrolled the nineteen barracks of the camp on their own initiative. Lastly, rotating groups of refugees helped to run and write Chân Trời Mới (New Horizons), the Vietnamese-language newspaper circulating throughout the camps that translated messages from the Red Cross and U.S. military officials, demystified immigration procedures, cautioned refugees to save water, featured photos and coverage of camp events (such as dances, concerts, and art shows), kept refugees up-to-date regarding news of the camps on the mainland, and acted as a message board for family members and loved ones trying to find and send notes to one another. Chân Trời Mới was written by refugees, for refugees. Rather than describe refugee activities for a voyeuristic observer, the newspaper concentrated on sharing practical information that would help the refugees negotiate life in the camps. In sum, camp residents made sure to go on living, refusing to let the war and the refugee crisis define them, finding moments of joy and entertainment within the confines of the camp. PDN articles and photos document refugees attending mass in silk aó dàis, swimming in the ocean, playing volleyball and basketball, watching movies such as Sinbad the Sailor, learning English on Asan Beach, painting art that would be exhibited in Guam’s Government House, trading comic books across a fence with the kids of naval families, and greeting Smokey the Bear.117 That is not to diminish, however, the fact that the refugees were indeed separated from the rest of the islanders and confined behind “barbed wire, chain-link fences, and armed guards,” and that many were deeply homesick, to the point of considering suicide.118 The U.S. military’s narrative of humanitarianism was thus underwritten by the reality of the refugees’ imprisonment. Although their acts of agency subverted the total control of the U.S. military, refugees remained dependent on the institution for granting them asylum and eventual citizenship.

101 This dependence on the U.S. military for subsistence and easy passage to the continental United States positioned Vietnamese refugees at odds with contemporaneous Chamorros struggles for decolonization. Although many Chamorros welcomed the Vietnamese refugees to Guam, empathizing with their plight, Vietnamese refugees were ultimately constituted as refugee settlers. The following chapter charts a parallel situation in Israel-Palestine: in the late 1970s, the Israeli government absorbed a small number of Vietnamese refugees in order to direct attention away from the ongoing dispossession of native Palestinians and to depict Israel as a Western, humanitarian nation. Vietnamese Israelis are also refugee settlers, who must grapple with their place in Israeli society and their relationship to Palestinian liberation. After narrating this analogous case study, chapter five returns to Guam to discuss quotidian representations of Operation New Life and its afterlives. By November 1975, most Vietnamese refugees had left Guam, either to resettle on the U.S. mainland or to repatriate back to Vietnam—a move that obfuscates but does not alleviate settler militarism, since the temporary nature of the refugees’ physical stay on Guam actually cemented the permanence of the military institution that hosted them. However, a small percentage of refugees decided to stay on Guam, raising the question of how a particular refugee sensibility can be mobilized to undermine a settler subjectivity, in order to avoid reproducing settler militarism on the island.

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1 Micronesian Area Research Center (MARC) Working Papers #68, Inventory of the Paper of Governor Ricardo Jerome Bordallo, compiled by William L. Wuerch, Magdelar S. Taitano, Carmen F. Quintanilla, Darien R. Siguera, Box 31, “Correspondence: Operation New Life, 1975.” Other secondary sources date the latter part of this telegram to March 27 or April 18, suggesting that this language was perhaps used on multiple occasions. 2 Citing the refugee asylum provision in the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, the Attorney General authorized the parole of some 150,000 Southeast Asian refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in 1975. The refugees would remain nonresident aliens until legislation reclassified them as aliens admitted for permanent residence. See “After Action Report: Operations New Life/New Arrivals: U.S. Army Support to the Indochinese Refugee Program, 1 April 1975-1 June 1976,” I-A-5. 3 Focusing on Hawai’i during the Pacific War, Juliet Nebolon proposes the concept of “settler militarism” to index how “settler colonialism and militarism have simultaneously perpetuated, legitimated, and concealed one another” (25). See Juliet Nebolon, “‘Life Given Straight from the Heart’: Settler Militarism, Biopolitics, and Public Health in Hawai’i during World War II,” American Quarterly 69, no. 1 (March 2017): 23–45. 4 Catherine Lutz, “Empire Is in the Details,” American Ethnologist 33, no. 4 (November 2006): 593–94; see also Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1961). 5 Nebolon, “Life Given Straight from the Heart.” 6 The “site-specific workings of the varied local expressions of the settler drive to eliminate Native territoriality have to be reconstructed in context and on their own terms” before we can “begin to derive general principles on which to base cross-colonial, cross-community, anti-racist solidarities.” Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016), 270. 7 Michael F. Phillips, “Land,” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 11. 8 Governor Ricardo J. Bordallo, quoted in Phillips, 2. 9 Phillips, 11. 10 A similar dynamic exists on other Pacific islands, such as Okinawa and the Marshall Islands. 11 “In the new American culture, which places considerable value on material possessions, owning a piece of land gives an individual the sole right to that property and to rule in the house built on it. The right of the individual to rule on his own property carries over into his family life and favors the nuclear family unit, as opposed to the shared rights and responsibilities of the extended family. Under American rule, and with the formation of a military form of government, there came the imposition of a confusing system of land registration, deeds, titles, taxes and unfamiliar building codes meant to preserve and protect individual ‘private property rights.’ Here again, many Chamorro government leaders, whose education has been in the American way since the cradle, have failed their own culture. By accepting American standards and imposing them by law, they are contributing to the further erosion of Chamorro values and the family orientation of Chamorro customs, practices and traditions.” Carmen Artero Kasperbauer, “The Chamorro Culture,” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 36–37; For a similar argument in the North American context, see Mark

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Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 12 Phillips, “Land,” 5. 13 Kasperbauer, “The Chamorro Culture,” 29; “[W]hen you take our big landowners back in Guam, everybody who has no farm of his own is welcome to come in and cultivate an acre if he wants to or raise any stuff that we wants so long as he does not get in the hair of the owner, and that is all for himself. We have no tenant system as understood in other places. We help one another out. The man with the big property goes ahead and pays the taxes on his property and welcomes anybody to come in.” –F. B. Leon Guerrero, presentation before U.S. Congress, 1935, as quoted in Phillips, “Land,” 6. 14 Anthony Leon Guerrero, “The Economic Development of Guam,” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 85–86. For more about låncho, see Michael Lujan Bevacqua, “Låncho: Ranch,” http://www.guampedia.com/lancho- ranch/, accessed 21 June 2017. 15 Hale’-Ta: I Ma Gobetna-Na Guam, Governing Guam: Before and After the Wars (Mangilao, Guam: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1994), 109. 16 For those who refer to the Americans’ return to Guam in 1944 as a “reoccupation,” see for example Anne Perez Hattori, “Righting Civil Wrongs: Guam Congress Walkout of 1949,” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 59; Cecilia C. T. Perez, “A Chamorro Re-Telling of ‘Liberation,’” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 74, 76; Guerrero, “The Economic Development of Guam,” 90. 17 Guerrero, “The Economic Development of Guam,” 90. 18 Guerrero, 91; Alfred Peredo Flores, “‘No Walk in the Park’: US Empire and the Racialization of Civilian Military Labor in Guam, 1944–1962,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2015): 813–35. 19 Rent was calculated using prewar 1941 values, which neither accounted for inflation nor the fact that the U.S. navy had isolated the island via a closed-door policy that stagnated the economy and artificially depressed land values. See B. J. Bordallo’s remarks in September 1972, quoted in Phillips, “Land,” 10. 20 Quoted in Leland Bettis, “Colonial Immigration in Guam,” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 106. 21 Rent was calculated using prewar 1941 values, which neither accounted for inflation nor the fact that the U.S. navy had isolated the island via a closed-door policy that stagnated the economy and artificially depressed land values. See B. J. Bordallo’s remarks in September 1972, quoted in Michael F. Phillips, “Land,” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 10. 22 Mark Forbes, “Military,” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 42.

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23 Robert Anacletus Underwood, “American Education and the Acculturation of the Chamorros on Guam” (Unpublished Dissertation, University of Southern California, 1987), 93–95; quoted in Hattori, “Righting Civil Wrongs,” 59. 24 Robert F. Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995), 230. 25 Rogers, 230. 26 Quoted in Phillips, “Land,” 9–10. Emphasis added. 27 Catherine Lutz, “US Military Bases on Guam in a Global Perspective,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 30, no. 3 (26 July 2010), http://apjjf.org/-Catherine-Lutz/3389/article.html; much of the information in this section appears in Espiritu, Body Counts, 28–29. 28 Nebolon, “Life Given Straight from the Heart,” 40. 29 1975 population of Guam taken from https://populationpyramid.net/guam/1975/. The number of refugees come from the “After Action Report” cited above. According to the report, the Army took care of over 112,000 refugees on Guam; however in total, over 130,000 Vietnamese refugees passed through Guam (xi). Operation Babylift (April 3-26) transferred roughly 2,700 Vietnamese orphans and children out of Vietnam, though besides an initial flight of 405 orphans who arrived at Guam International Air Terminal on April 6, it is unclear how many of these actually went through Guam. Most flew through Clark AFB. 30 Felix Moos and C. S. Morrison, “The Vietnamese Refugees at Our Doorstep: Political Ambiguity and Successful Improvisation,” Review of Policy Research 1, no. 1 (August 1981): 33.; “One Year Later…” Islander, May 30 1976, 4; “50,430 Evacuees On-Island,” Pacific Daily News, 15 May 1975, 3. 31 Pedro C. Sanchez, Guahan/Guam: The History of Our Island (Agana, Guam: Sanchez Publishing House, 1991), 380.; Jim Eggensperger, “15,000 Arrive Here Ragged and Dazed,” Pacific Daily News, 8 May 1975, 1; Jim Eggensperger, “Evacuee Capacity Reached With 15,000 Sea Arrivals,” Pacific Daily News, 13 May 1975, 1, 6. 32 Jim Eggensperger, “Water Cutoffs Considered,” Pacific Daily News, 14 May 1975, 1. 33 Jim Eggensperger, “Camps Here Almost Full: Some Arrivals Flown to Wake to Ease Local Crowding,” Pacific Daily News, 10 May 1975, 1, 3. 34 In his memoir, Trần Đình Trụ writes that Camp Asan was originally built “as a barracks for U.S. Marines waiting to embark on their tour of duty in Vietnam” and stresses the irony that “this same camp has become a temporary shelter for us, the Vietnamese repatriates.” Although this information is not completely accurate—Camp Asan was actually first built in 1947 to house the U.S. Navy Seabees who came to help reconstruct the island following World War II—the overall point is significant: there is indeed a sense of irony that military complexes that facilitated U.S. imperial aggression during the Vietnam War were then used to house Vietnamese refugees displaced by that same war. See Trần Đình Trụ, Ship of Fate: Memoir of a Vietnamese Repatriate, trans. Bac Hoai Tran and Jana K. Lipman (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017), 90. 35 “Where They Are,” Pacific Daily News, 28 April 1975, 4; “Tokyu Hotel on Guam Busy Again,” Hawaii Times, April 29 1975; “One Year Later…” Islander, 30 May 1976, 6; “The Camp Sites,” Pacific Daily News, 19 July 2005, 6. The military leased the Tokyu Hotel. In contrast, the other three local construction companies were paid roughly $32 per week per refugee by the military, as well as promised reimbursement for any restoration or repairs necessitated by the housing of refugees. See Susan Guffey, “New Life Spends $1.7 Million

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Here,” Pacific Daily News, 21 May 1975, 1. Tent City was closed on June 25 in anticipation of the upcoming rainy season. See Dave Hendrick, “Tent City is Closed,” Pacific Daily News, 25 June 1975, 1. 36 According to historian Jana K. Lipman, the U.S. government chose Guam as the “staging ground for the first refugee camps because of its geographic location and because of U.S. sovereignty over the island.” Jana K. Lipman, “Introduction,” in Ship of Fate: Memoir of a Vietnamese Repatriate (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017), 16. 37 Tiara R. Na’puti and Michael Lujan Bevacqua, “Militarization and Resistance from Guåhan: Protecting and Defending Pågat,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (September 2015): 837. 38 Forbes, “Military,” 43. 39 Max V. Soliven, “Where the Political ‘War’ is Ending, and They’re Getting Set for Another ‘War,’” PhilStar Global, 5 November 2002, http://beta.philstar.com/opinion/2002/11/05/182667/where-political-145war146-ending-and- they146re-getting-set-another-145war146, accessed 17 June 2017. 40 Lutz, “US Military Bases on Guam in a Global Perspective.” 41 Joe Murphy, “Pipe Dreams,” Pacific Daily News, 30 April 1975, 16; Bob Klitzkie, “Guam Played Major Role During War,” Pacific Daily News, 23 April 2000, 20. 42 Soliven, “Where the Political ‘War’ is Ending,” n.p. 43 Sanchez, Guahan/Guam: The History of Our Island, 352; Jana K. Lipman, “‘Give Us a Ship’: The Vietnamese Repatriate Movement on Guam, 1975,” American Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2012): 6. 44 “Total Military Recruits: Army, Navy, Air Force (per capita) (most recent) by state,” StateMaster.com, accessed 16 July 2017, http://www.statemaster.com/graph/mil_tot_mil_rec_arm_nav_air_for_percap-navy-air-force-per- capita. 45 Moos and Morrison, “The Vietnamese Refugees at Our Doorstep: Political Ambiguity and Successful Improvisation,” 34; “Refugee Aid Bill Clears One House Hurdle,” Honolulu Advertiser, 8 May 1975. 46 William Greider, “Our Last Burst of Ugly Passion,” Pacific Daily News, 9 May 1975, 30. 47 Espiritu, Body Counts; Greider, “Our Last Burst of Ugly Passion,” 30; Quoted in Joe Murphey, “Editorial: The U.S. and Refugees…” Pacific Daily News, 7 May 1975, 15. 48 Arlene Lum, “Refugees Face Racial Hostility,” Pacific Daily News, 5 June 1975, 12. 49 Espiritu, Body Counts, 30. 50 Murrey Marder, “Refugees to Guam,” The Washington Post, 24 April 1975, A1, A10. 51 “Guam Pepares for 50,000 as U.S. Shifts Refugee Base,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, 25 April 1975, A-1. 52 “Operation New Life Timeline,” Pacific Daily News, 19 July 2005, 7. 53 James A. Hebert, “Job Center Finding Evacuees Homes,” Pacific Daily News, 24 April 1975, 3A; David L. Teibel, “Fear, Hostility, Concern Greet Arrivals to Guam,” Pacific Daily News, 24 April 1975, 3A. 54 According to the 1947 Military Bases Agreement, the U.S. had control of Clark ARB, but the Philippines had sovereignty over it. Thus, Marcos could refuse entry to the Vietnamese refugees. In contrast, according the Guam Organic Act of 1950, the U.S. federal government held plenary powers over Guam and its bases, so Guam could not refuse even if it wanted to. In late April, Representative Richard White (D.-Tex.) proposed that the islands of the Pacific Trust Territory serve as a way station for the evacuees. Like Guam, the Trust Isles were a territory of

106 the U.S. (from 1947-1986). In his letter to President Ford, Rep. White cites a racialized logic that can be applied to the Chamorros on Guam as well: “They would be in a location similar to their own in climate and terrain, and with people of similar ethnic strain. They would avoid the cultural shock of being suddenly deposited in a country and a society completely foreign to them.” Cited in John E. Simonds, “Trust Isles Refuge Suggested,” Honolulu Star Bulletin, April 26 1975. As explicated further below, the Vietnamese refugees and Pacific peoples were sometimes racialized as homogenous populations by the U.S. military. 55 Jenna M. Loyd, Emily Mitchell-Eaton, and Alison Mountz, “The Militarization of Islands and Migration: Tracing Human Mobility through US Bases in the Caribbean and the Pacific,” Political Geography 52 (2016): 69. 56 For a historical account of the changing rhetoric of human rights, see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). 57 Colonel John D. O’Donahue: “I think one of the biggest things that has made this operation a go, is that it’s self motivated. Everyone here senses the urgency of the job, and has tremendous compassion for the people that are here. And they’re all pitching in.” Quoted by SSG. Frank Madison, “‘Compassion’ Motivates Helpers,” Military Sun, May 21 1975. For a description of the 24 hour workday, see “‘Operation New Life’: People Helping People,” Military Sun, 21 May 1975. 58 Paul Miller, “Guam Actions ‘A Great Story’: Vietnam Issue Won’t Die Quickly,” Pacific Daily News, May 10 1975, 35. 59 Lyle Nelson, “Seabees and Vietnam,” Honolulu Star Bulletin, 10 May 1975. Emphasis added. Overall Operation New Life seemed to boost soldiers’ morale. Staff Sergeant Clarence Randall, Company C, 1/5th Infantry, testified: “This is one of the few times in the Army that I’ve had a chance to be on a peace mission. Most of the time when the Army is called on, it’s to destroy something. But here we have the opportunity to do something to help somebody. I am proud to be here.” -“‘Operation New Life’: People Helping People,” Military Sun, 21 May 1975; Sanchez, Guahan/Guam: The History of Our Island, 380. 60 Lipman, “‘Give Us a Ship’: The Vietnamese Repatriate Movement on Guam, 1975”; Ayako Sahara, “Operations New Life/Arrivals: U.S. National Project to Forget the Vietnam War” (MA thesis, UC San Diego, 2009); Heather Marie Stur, “‘Hiding Behind the Humanitarian Label’: Refugees, Repatriates, and the Rebuilding of America’s Benevolent Image After the Vietnam War,” Diplomatic History 0, no. 0 (2014): 1–24, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dht128. 61 Espiritu, Body Counts, 35 emphasis in original. 62 I thank Long Le-Khac for this insight, which he shared with me at the 2017 Association of Asian American Studies Conference following my presentation of parts of this chapter. 63 According to Espiritu, “the Pacific military bases, Clark and Andersen AFB, and California’s Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, credited and valorized for resettling Vietnamese refugees in 1975, were the very ones responsible for inducing the refugee displacement. The massive tonnage of bombs, along with the ground fighting provided by Marine units like Camp Pendleton’s 1st Marines, displaced some twelve million people in South Vietnam—almost half the country’s total population at the time—from their homes.” See Espiritu, Body Counts, 39. 64 “Guam Legislators Stall on Refugee Aid,” Hawaii-Hochi, 25 April 1975. 65 Leanne McLaughlin, “Senators Deny Help from Guam,” Pacific Daily News, 26 April 1975, 4. 66 Quoted in “Guam Expects Diseases Outbreak,” Honolulu Star Bulletin, May 21 1975 and Jim Eggensperger, “Slowdown Worries Leaders,” Pacific Daily News, 21 May 1975, 3.

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67 “[C]olonial discourses distinguish multiple ‘others’ with the intent to rule them differently.” Lanny Thompson, Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories under U.S. Dominion after 1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2010), 11; However, “[t]he incompleteness of racial domination is the trace and the achievement of resistance, a space of hope.” Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, 272. 68 Madison, “‘Compassion’ Motivates Helpers.” According to Carmen Artero Kasperbauer, who traces Chamorro culture back thousands of years, Chamorros are on the whole “a gentle, peaceful and loving people” that are “often praised” for their “warmth, friendliness, generosity and hospitality.” -Kasperbauer, “The Chamorro Culture,” 29. 69 Quoted in Dave Hendrick, “Guam’s Refugee Role ‘Pleases’ Capital,” Pacific Daily News, 1 June 1975, 3. 70 MARC, Box 31, 15 May 1975. 71 Jesus Quitugua Charfauros, Conversation with author in response to author’s presentation of parts of this research at the Militarism & Migration conference in San Diego, 22 April 2017. 72 Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam, 250–51. 73 Sanchez, Guahan/Guam: The History of Our Island, 379. The last quote is quoted in Cecilia Perez, “A Chamorro Retelling of Liberation,” Kinalamten Pulitikat-Siñenten I Chamorro/Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Mangilao, Guam: Guam Political Status Education Coordination Commission, 1996). 74 Reprinted in “U.S. & Guam,” Honolulu Advertiser, 30 April 1975. 75 Vivian Dames, “Agent Orange in Guam, Part 1: Sprayed and Betrayed,” Beyond the Fence, Ep. 149, June 1 2013, http://kprg.podbean.com/2013/06/01/ep-149-%25E2%2580%259Cagent- orange-in-guam-part-1-sprayed-and-betrayed%25E2%2580%259D/; Kyla P. Mora, “Air Force Veteran, 72, Alleges Agent Orange Use on Andersen Air Force Base,” Pacific Daily News, January 7 2017; Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam, 253.; James A. Hebert, “Feeding Tent City Refugees: $1.6 Million,” Pacific Daily News, 24 May 1975, 3. 76 For more on Operation PACER HO, see Alvin Lee Young, “Removal from Vietnam and Final Disposition of Agent Orange,” in The History, Use, Disposition and Environmental Fate of Agent Orange (New York: Springer New York, 2009), 121–60. Micronesia, a subset of Oceania, includes the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, and Nauru, as well as three U.S. territories: Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and Wake Island. Guam is 3049 miles away from Johnston Island. 77 Tony Hodges, quoted in Jerry Tune, “New Plans Proposed for Saving Defoliant,” Honolulu Star Bulletin, 26 April 1975. 78 Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 79 The quote comes from Espiritu, Body Counts, 49; For “previous studies,” see for example Richard Harding and John Looney, “Problems of Southeast Asian Children in a Refugee Camp,” American Journal of Psychiatry 134 (1977): 407–11; Gail Paradise Kelly, From Vietnam to America: A Chronicle of the Vietnamese Immigration to the United States (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977); Kwok Bun Chan and Kenneth Loveridge, “Refugees in ‘Transit’: Vietnamese in a Refugee Camp in Hong Kong,” International Migration Review 21 (n.d.): 745– 59; E. F. Kunz, “The Refugee in Flight: Kinetic Models and Forms of Displacement,” International Migration Review 7, no. 2 (1973): 125–46; C. S. Morrison and Felix Moos, “Halfway to Nowhere: Vietnamese Refugees on Guam,” in Involuntary Migration and

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Resettlement: The Problems and Responses of Dislocated People, ed. Art Hansen and Anthony Oliver-Smith (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982), 49–68. 80 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Espiritu, Body Counts, 76. 81 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 133. 82 Espiritu also critiques how “Agamben, like many other refugee camps studies scholars, tends to read the camp as a unified and monolithic type of space rather than explaining how different types of camps rely on different logics and daily material practices.” Espiritu, Body Counts, 76. 83 Matt Franjola, “Vietnamese, All Well-Dressed, Try to Get Evacuated,” Pacific Daily News, 25 April 1975, 2; Dave Hendrick, “Vietnam’s ‘Richest’ in ‘Tin City’?”, Pacific Daily News, 27 April 1975, 4. Many other examples abound. 84 Martha Ruth, “Gold Aplenty At ‘Tent City,’” Pacific Daily News, 13 May 1975, 14. 85 Garry Marchant, “Incredible Taels of Tent City Gold Rush,” South China Morning Post, 27 May 1975, 6. 86 “The Guam authorizes have also set the prices of gold which allow dealers some margin for profit, but prevents them from taking undue advantage of the refugees.” -“Gold Rush in Guam,” South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), 23 May 1975,1. “The government has put strict controls on the purchase of gold from Vietnamese refugees here because it says the refugees have been cheated by buyers who didn’t pay a fair price.” -“Bilking of Refugees Claimed,” Honolulu Start Bulletin, 28 May 1975. 87 Betty L. Johnson, “Voice of the People,” Pacific Daily News, 1 May 1975, 26. 88 “The priority and the unequivocal value assigned to the noncommunist identity effectively required all applicants to prove to the skeptical examiners that they were fleeing communism, thereby reducing the multifaceted histories of the Vietnam War and their flight into a single story about communist persecution. Thus, at the very inception of their incorporation into the U.S. nation, Vietnamese refugees were interpellated foremost as anticommunist subjects.” Espiritu, Body Counts, 55. 89 Johnson, “Voice of the People, 26. 90 Johnson, 26. 91 See for example Kornel Chang, “Enforcing Transnational White Solidarity: Asian Migration and the Formation of the U.S.-Canadian Boundary,” American Quarterly 60, no. 3 (September 2008): 671–96. 92 James A. Hebert, “Feeding Tent City Refugees: $1.6 Million,” Pacific Daily News, 24 May 1975, 3. 93 See, for example, David Nally, “The Biopolitics of Food Provisioning,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36, no. 1 (2011): 37–53; Taylor Chloe, “Foucault and Food,” in Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, ed. Paul B. Thompson and David M. Kaplan (Springer Netherlands, 2014), 1042–49; John Coveney, Food, Morals, and Meaning: The Pleasure and Anxiety of Eating (New York: Routledge, 2000). 94 Quoted in Gannett News Service, “Refugees Find Pennsylvania Camp ‘Nicer,’” Pacific Daily News, 5 June 1975, 4. 95 Quoted in John M. Achterkirchen, “Arrivals Here Steady,” Pacific Daily News, 30 April 1975, 1.

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96 “The refugees sometimes complained about their accommodations but more often they complained about the food.” –Ronald Klimek, “The Refugee Success Formula: Group Effort & Hard Work,” Islander, 30 May 1976, 6. 97 For more on the debt-bound grateful refugee narrative, see Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom. 98 Jim Eggensperger, “Island Was Safe Haven for 1,000s,” Pacific Daily News, 14 January 1976, 3A; “Refugees May Be Here Through Summer,” Pacific Daily News, 31 May 1975, 10. 99 Klimek, “The Refugee Success Formula,” 6. 100 Guerrero, “The Economic Development of Guam.” 101 Dave Hendrick, “The Black Market is Everywhere,” Pacific Daily News, 15 June 1975, 1, 4. 102 Guerrero, “The Economic Development of Guam.” 103 Ling Samaina, Author’s interview, 3 June 2016. 104 “Cô Hồng,” Author’s interview, 29 May 2016. See also the poem “Nước Mấm” in Thanhha Lai, Inside Out & Back Again (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 100–102. This is one of the few texts of diasporic Vietnamese literature to dwell upon, let alone mention, the Vietnamese refugee experience on Guam. Other diasporic Vietnamese literary works that mention Guam (albeit in passing) include Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer (New York: Grove Press, 2016); Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees (New York: Grove Press, 2017). 105 Guffey, “Evacuee Flood Flows On,” 3. 106 Guffey, 3. 107 Jim Eggensperger, “Flow of Refugees From Island Now Below 1,000 Daily,” Pacific Daily News, 15 May 1975, 3. 108 Edward F. O’Connor, associate commissioner of examinations for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), quoted in Leanne McLaughlin, “Processing Speeded Up,” Pacific Daily News, 30 April 1975, 9A. 109 O’Connor, 9A. My grandmother also recalls being allowed to bring her domestic servant to the U.S. with her (although she had no money to pay her, and eventually found her a better home). 110 James A. Hebert, “Man, Fiancee Reunited Here,” Pacific Daily News, 9 May 1975, 1; James A. Hebert, “New York Man, Viet Bride Have Guam Wedding License,” Pacific Daily News, 10 May 1975, 3; “A 3-Year Wait Ends Today,” The Sunday News, 11 May 1975, 1; James A. Hebert, “Pair Recite Vows,” Pacific Daily News, 12 May 1975, 1, 3; Ed Kelleher, “Love Story— In Full,” Pacific Daily News, 14 January 1976, 16A. 111 Kelleher, “Love Story,” 16A. 112 Dave Hendrick, “At Barrigada, Refugees Form Own Cleaning, Cooking Crews,” Pacific Daily News, 28 April 1975, 5. 113 Susan Guffey, “Asan Camp Picks Own Commander,” Pacific Daily News, 26 April 1975, 3; Susan Guffey, “Four Weeks Later, Tony Still Manages Asan Camp,” Pacific Daily News, 26 May 1975, 1, 6-7. 114 “Refugees Celebrate July 4 Under a Flag of Freedom,” Pacific Daily News, 5 July 1975, 1, 5. 115 Susan Guffey, “There’s Nothing To Do But Wait,” Pacific Daily News, 18 May 1975, 3. 116 Susan Guffey, “Asan Loses Leader,” Pacific Daily News, 24 July 1975, 3; John M. Achterkirchen, “Beach Provides A Way to Beat Camp ‘Security,’” Pacific Daily News, 30 April 1975, 7A. 117 Susan Guffey, “Camp Asan Celebrates First Mass,” Pacific Daily News, 28 April 1975, 3; “Clean and Cool in Mud and Heat,” Pacific Daily News, 30 April 1975, 12A; “Fun and Food

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Playing Roles in ‘New Life,’” Pacific Daily News, 1 May 1975, 1; P. J. Ryan, “Photo of refugees at Black Construction Co. playing basketball,” Pacific Daily News, 19 May 1975, 1; Dave Hendrick, “Sinbad Soothes the Long Wait,” Pacific Daily News, 4 May 1975, 3; David V. Crisostomo, “Guam Hosts Refugees in 1975,” Pacific Daily News, 18 July 2005, 1; Josephine Mallo, “His Art, Himself are All He Has,” Pacific Daily News, 4 August 1975, 22; Joe Murphey, “Pipe Dreams,” Pacific Daily News, 2 July 1975, 18; P. J. Ryan, “Furry . . . But Bearable,” Pacific Daily News, 13 June 1975, 3. 118 Lipman, “‘Give Us a Ship’: The Vietnamese Repatriate Movement on Guam, 1975,” 6. “Some Refugees Badly Homesick; Others Worried, Nearing Suicide,” Pacific Daily News, 14 May 1975, 21.

111 Chapter 4: Refugees in a State of Refuge: Vietnamese Israelis and the Question of Palestine

On 5 June 1967, Israeli forces launched a series of airstrikes against Egyptian airfields, initiating the Six Day War—alternatively known as the June War, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, or Third Arab–Israeli War—against its neighboring Arab nations. By 10 June 1967, Israel had radically expanded its territorial control over Palestine, commencing the ongoing occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and conquering the Sinai Peninsula, which it later rescinded, and the Golan Heights, the western portion of which remains occupied. Exactly one decade later, on 10 June 1977, Captain Meir Tadmor of the Israel cargo ship Yuvali picked up a group of sixty-six Vietnamese refugees—thirty-four men, sixteen women, and sixteen children—who were floating adrift in the South China Sea.1 The refugees had escaped from Vietnam by fishing boat four days earlier. Dr. Tran Quang Hoa, a former army surgeon, explained: “Conditions in Vietnam were unbearable. We feared for our lives. I couldn’t support Communism—I suffered too long from them.”2 Five ships—including ones representing Panama, Norway, and Japan— had passed by the refugees without offering assistance, violating one of the most basic rules of the sea, before Captain Tadmor picked them up. Tadmor tried to drop the displaced Vietnamese off at a refugee camp, but they were denied asylum in Taiwan, Japan, and Hong Kong. Finally, on 21 June 1977, newly-elected Prime Minister Menachem Begin proclaimed from the Knesset podium that the State of Israel would absorb the group of sixty-six Vietnamese refugees as his first official act in office.3 Two more waves of Vietnamese refugees would follow in 1979, bringing the total amount of Vietnamese refugees granted asylum in Israel to 366.4 Prime Minister Begin said he sympathized with the Vietnamese refugees because “their plight evoked memories of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany and being denied entry to Palestine.”5 In a speech to President Jimmy Carter on the White House Lawn on 19 July 1977, Begin elaborated: We remember, we have never forgotten that boat with 900 Jews, having left Germany in the last weeks before the Second World War for Cuba. . . . We have never forgotten the lot of our people, persecuted, humiliated, ultimately physically destroyed. And therefore, it was natural that my first act as Prime Minister was to give those people a haven in the land of Israel.6 Begin translated the post-1975 Vietnamese refugee crisis into a Jewish Israeli context, drawing parallels between “that boat with 900 Jews”—the SS St. Louis, which left Germany on 13 May 1939 but was turned away by the U.S. at Havana and forced to return to Europe, where many died at the hands of Nazis—and the iconic images of Vietnamese boat people that were then circulating in the post-Vietnam War international media. Focusing on the synecdochical figure of the Holocaust refugee fleeing by boat during World War II, Begin suggested that Israel’s recent history of Holocaust displacement uniquely positioned the Jewish nation to empathize with the displaced Vietnamese refugees, the majority of whom fled Vietnam, also by boat, following the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, the Fall of Saigon, and the reunification of the decolonizing country under Communist rule. Such an empathy based on paralleled histories of refugee displacement, however, did not extend to the contemporaneous context of Palestinian refugeehood. In representing itself as a benevolent Western democracy capable of granting aid to racialized refugees in need, Israel directed attention away from its own role in

112 displacing and dispossessing the native Palestinian population, ever since its settler colonial foundation in 1948. This chapter details the passage of Vietnamese refugees to the State of Israel: how and why were these three waves of Vietnamese refugees absorbed into Israel, despite their non- Jewish status? Why did they constitute an exception to Israel’s strict asylum policy? How did the state position the refugees rhetorically, and to what end? How did they fit into Israel’s racial politics of difference? How has the historic case of their absorption been cited and recited in regards to more recent refugee crises? I argue that Israel simultaneous represented itself as a Western humanitarian nation modeled after the U.S. and capable of contributing to the global Southeast Asian refugee rescue efforts, and a Jewish nation of refugees uniquely positioned to empathize with the Vietnamese refugees’ plight, in order to overwrite criticisms of Israel’s dispossession, settler colonialism, and occupation in Palestine—a rhetorical move Candace Fujikane has identified in another context as “yellowwashing.”7 The United States, meanwhile, connects Vietnam and Israel-Palestine via its imperial reach: U.S. intervention in Vietnam contributed to the mass exodus of Vietnamese refugees, and U.S. foreign aid to Israel underwrites Israel’s settlement and occupation of Palestine. The Vietnamese refugee passage to Israel is therefore structured by the archipelagic contours of U.S. military empire. Asian American Studies—and American Studies more broadly—has witnessed a resurgent interest in issues of settler colonialism and to the question of Palestine more specifically, identifying how the Asian (American) subject has the potential to either uphold the co-constitutive settler colonial logics of the U.S. and Israel or forge decolonial solidarities, or both.8 However, none of these works take up the figure of the refugee, and by extension the problem of the refugee settler. Meanwhile, Yến Lê Espiritu has charted the transformative field of critical refugee studies, which “reconceptualizes ‘the refugee’ not as an object of rescue but as a site of social and political critiques, whose emergence, when traced, would make visible the processes of colonization, war, and displacement” that undergird U.S. military empire.9 Putting critical refugee studies in conversation with settler colonial studies, this chapter traces the production of the refugee settler condition in Israel-Palestine. Tracing refugee routes across spaces of settler colonialism requires attending to the liminal spaces of U.S. military empire, identifying those who reside outside the borders of the U.S. nation-state and yet whose displacement can be traced to U.S. military intervention: Vietnamese Israelis displaced by American intervention in Vietnam, and Palestinians displaced by U.S.-backed Israeli settlement and occupation.

Three Waves: Vietnamese Refugees and the Passage to Israel Who can claim the status of a refugee? How does the term “refugee” travel across multiple contexts: spatial, rhetorical, legal? In Israel, the Jewish state retains a monopoly over refugee discourse. The history of Holocaust refugeehood figures prominently in the much longer national narrative of Jewish exile since the fall of the Second Temple in 70 CE, and subsequent Jewish return to the Holy Land—regardless of the actual demographic percentage of Israeli citizens who trace their family histories to Holocaust displacement. Indeed, this privileging of a “Holocaust refugee” narrative elides other waves of Jewish immigration and racial formation in Israel: Ashkenazi elites, inspired a European ideology of Jewish nationalism, who settled Palestine prior to World War II; Yemeni Jewish laborers recruited by these Ashkenazi pioneers to build a Zionist state; Mizrahi Jews (including Sephardi, Ethiopian and Indian Jews) from North Africa and the former Ottoman Empire who remain trapped in a low socioeconomic status

113 despite their numeric majority in Israel; and post-Soviet “Jews”—many of whom are actually Christian—who were allegedly brought in to “whiten” the Arab-majority population in Israel in the late 1980-90s.10 Today, Ashkenazi Jews from Europe are disproportionately represented in government, business, and higher education in Israel, despite their demographic minority status. This Israeli national identity of Jewish refugeehood in turn can be activated to either project empathy with other displaced populations—such as the Vietnamese boat people—or deny refugee status to them—as is the case with the Palestinians. Such rhetoric is evidenced by Prime Minister Begin’s assertion in 1977 that “the Israeli people, who have known persecution, and know, perhaps better than any other nation, what it means to be a refugee, couldn’t watch the suffering of these wretched people. It’s only natural to grant them a refuge in our country.”11 Here, “wretched people” refers exclusively to the Vietnamese refugees; such a designation does not extend to displaced Palestinians, or even to non-Vietnamese refugees from Cambodia or Laos, as I will explain below. Palestinians have had a vexed relationship to the position of the “refugee” ever since the term’s inception as an internationally recognized legal category. The 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, which Israel signed yet never adopted into its own national legislation, purposely excludes displaced Palestinians. Initially written in response to the mass uprooting of European peoples following World War II, the 1951 Convention and the later 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees argued that Palestinians were already protected by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), established in 1949 following the State of Israel’s declaration of independence on Palestinian land. Such a distinction in jurisdiction has often benefited the State of Israel, as evidenced by meeting notes from the twenty-ninth and thirtieth sessions of the Executive Committee of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). At the twenty-ninth session, held at the Palace of Nations in Geneva from 9-17 October 1978, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Poul Hartling stressed the “universality of refugee problems,” but the issue of Palestinian displacement remained under-discussed.12 In a press release dated 17 October 1978, the United Nations acknowledged that the Delegate of Lebanon had asked for assistance regarding “the vast problems confronting the displaced persons in his country as a result of recent events,” but such phrasing refrained from explicitly identifying the Palestinian refugees or the cause of their displacement: the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) invasion of Lebanon in March 1978.13 A year later, an unpublished report sent by Israeli Ambassador Eviatar Manor to the International Organizations department in Israel, detailing the thirtieth session of the UNHCR held at the Palace of Nations in Geneva from 8-16 October 1979, draws special attention to a speech by the Iranian delegate, who brought up the Palestinian refugee case in relation to the present Southeast Asian refugee crisis. The delegate expressed his support for the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)’s struggle. Manor reports with relief, however, that the “conflict in the Middle East” was not mentioned otherwise, and that the session’s delegates generally agreed that the UNCHR’s field of responsibility did not extend to Palestinian refugees. In sum, this session, which emphasized the UNHCR’s commitment to “saving refugees at sea” and invoked the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, privileged the rescue of Southeast Asian refugees at the same time that it rejected the plight of Palestinian refugees as beyond its jurisdiction—all to the State of Israel’s benefit.14 Interestingly, Arab nationalists also originally countered efforts to include Palestinians under the 1951 Convention, though for different reasons.15 They worried that the 1951 Convention, which advocated the absorption of refugees into other nation-states of asylum,

114 would preclude Palestinians’ Right of Return to their own lands in occupied Palestine, effectively surrendering the newly established State of Israel to the Jewish Zionists.16 To this day, the UNHCR still does not recognize Palestinians as part of their jurisdiction. Other early General Assembly resolutions referred to Palestinians as “refugees,” but following Resolution 3236 passed in 1974, Palestinians were referred to as a “people,” reflecting arguments that their displacement was not a problem of refugeehood per se, but rather a denial of their national right to self-determination.17 Adding another layer of complication, the UNWRA’s own registry of Palestinians refugees is incomplete, because it defines Palestinian refugees “in relation to relief, not rights.”18 According to Ilana Feldman, “Because the definition was developed to implement the UNRWA relief mandate, rather than to account for Palestinian loss and displacement (as relevant to UN resolutions and Palestinian political claims), it did not ever include the whole of the population that had claims to property, to return, and to national self-determination.”19 Refugee status is a precondition for eligibility for the Palestinian Right of Return, should UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which resolved that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date,” ever come to fruition. Lacking an official body to register Palestinian refugee status—especially for later generations born outside of their homeland—many Palestinians rightfully worry about their ability to prove their land claims, should the time come. Such ambiguities highlight the vexed relationship displaced Palestinians have to the legal category of “refugees” under international law. Such vexed rhetorics of refugeehood lead to conflicting politics of return. Israel’s Law of Return—which grants diasporic Jews who “return” to Israel automatic citizenship—precludes not only Palestinians’ Right of Return, but any codified legal procedure for non-Jewish refugees to gain asylum, let alone citizenship, in the State of Israel. Furthermore, Jewish immigration to ;aliyah), an accession to Mount Zion in Jerusalem) עֲלִיָּה Israel is conceived of in Biblical terms as ,olim), is derived from this term. To this day) עולים ,the Hebrew word for (Jewish) immigrants Israel has no standardized legal process of naturalization for non-Jewish populations, let alone a distinct word to describe non-Jewish immigrants. ,פליטים מווייטנאם) Prime Minister Begin’s absorption of sixty-six Vietnamese refugees plitim mi-Vietnam) in 1977 was therefore quite an exception within Israel’s own immigration and asylum policy. According to Yehudit Hueber, an Interior Ministry official, this was “the first time Israel had received a party of non-Jewish refugees.”20 Furthermore, although “Israel normally gives no aid to non-Jewish immigrants,” the “Vietnamese would receive the same aid offered to Jewish newcomers.” Upon arrival at Ben-Gurion Airport on 26 June 1977, each refugee was given $70, canned food, and a packet of tea. They were transferred to Ofakim, a development town of Yemenite and North African immigrants seventy-five miles south of Tel Aviv, where they were greeted with welcome signs and a youth band playing “Jerusalem the Gold.” At the welcome ceremony, Israeli Minister of Immigrant Absorption David Levi chastised the ships that had ignored the leaking boat full of Vietnamese refugees: “Let them do as we have. May they lend a hand to save women and children who are in the heart of the sea without a homeland, and lead them to safe shores.”21 During the first six months, the refugees stayed at the absorption center in Ofakim, learned Hebrew, and received subsistence subsidies and free medical insurance from the government.22 In December 1977, they moved to more permanent housing around Tel Aviv, where they were given loans and grants to purchase new furniture and appliances. The refugees found employment in tourism, industry, fishing, and medicine; one family opened up a

115 Vietnamese restaurant. All the refugees were of ethnic Vietnamese origin, and several spoke English and French in addition to Vietnamese. Because Israel has no standardized naturalization process for non-Jewish immigrants, the Vietnamese refugees’ legal status was improvised. They first received special tourists visas that granted them permission to find permanent work.23 Then, they were given identity cards and temporary residency permits which included limited civil rights to work, fair housing, social security, pensions, and medical insurance. Finally, those who chose to stay in Israel were granted permanent residency status and the promise of citizenship after five years. From a demographic perspective, Prime Minister Begin’s absorption of a mere sixty-six Vietnamese refugees may appear insignificant, especially when compared to the hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asian refugees absorbed by the United States, Canada, France, and Australia. The event’s rhetorical significance, however, outweighs its demographic impact, as evidenced by the profusion of media articles documenting this event.24 Israel made sure to publicize the humanitarian act in order to promote a favorable representation in the international sphere. Part of this has to do with the specificity of Begin’s positionality within Israeli politics. Prior to his term as Prime Minister, Begin served as the leader of the Zionist paramilitary organization Irgun, which operated in Mandate Palestine between 1931 and 1948, and as the head of the early right-wing political party Herut (meaning “Freedom”)—both of which have been accused of Jewish terrorism owing to their militant tactics. In 1977, when Begin represented the Likud party, his victory marked the first time in Israeli history that a right-wing party had wrested control of the government. Begin’s absorption of the sixty-six Vietnamese refugees as his first official act as Prime Minister was therefore partially meant to quell concerns that his newly right-wing government would upset a legacy of Jewish liberalism. Furthermore, by representing Israel as a haven for displaced Jews that would compassionately grant aid to other refugees in need, Begin displaced criticisms of Israel’s settler colonial occupation of Palestine. Responding in part to the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, which in 1975 had denounced Zionism as a “form of racism and racial discrimination,” Begin instead presented Israel as a benevolent, multicultural Western democracy, whose own recent history of Holocaust displacement uniquely positioned Israelis to empathize with the Vietnamese refugees.25 In the words of one Israeli reporter: “There’s something suspicions about the self- gratitude of the heads of the establishment, the wish to prove with the media to the whole world how moral and pretty we are, how we look after the Holocaust refugees of other countries, as if we can’t follow our own conscience without the whole world knowing about it.”26 Here, Vietnamese refugees were racialized as passive victims upon which to write a narrative of Israeli humanitarian aid.27 Following Begin’s humanitarian act of absorption, Israel hadn’t initially planned to accept more refugees. When Professor Yigael Yadin, serving as Deputy Prime Minister in late 1978 while Begin travelled overseas, proposed that Israel absorb another group of Vietnamese refugees, the majority of the Cabinet (executive branch) rejected his suggestion.28 Meanwhile on 11 November 1978, Members of the Knesset Dov Shilansky (Likud) and Akiva Nof (Democratic Movement) raised two separate procedural motions to either fully absorb or offer temporary shelter to 2,500 refugees stranded on the Hai Hong, a ship that had anchored off the coast of Port Klang in October but was refused permission to land in Malaysia; however, the motion was tabled to the Knesset Committee and then to the Committee of Interior Ecology, and by then Canada had already absorbed the ship’s refugees.29 Likewise, at a UN meeting that took place 11-12 December 1978 in Geneva on the question of Southeast refugees, it was agreed that Israeli

116 Ambassador Joel Barromi should offered medicaments, but that Israel would not commit to absorbing more refugees at the time.30 (Barromi initially protested such a decision, countering that “Our participation is of value for propaganda purposes since a refugee tragedy is involved,” but he was overruled.)31 In January 1979, however, Israel changed its mind, swayed in part by a deluge of earnest letters from Israeli citizens and the Jewish diaspora that echoed Begin’s rhetoric: as nation of Jewish refugees, Israel should empathize with the Vietnamese refugees, and absorb greater numbers.32 In late December 1978, the rusty freighter Tung An had marooned in Manila Bay, leaving over 2,318 Vietnamese refugees stranded.33 About 240 of these refugees were granted asylum in countries such as France, West Germany, New Zealand, Switzerland, Britain, and Hong Kong. On 8 January 1979, Begin and the ministers of Israel’s executive branch decided to absorb 100 refugees from the Tung An.34 They also set up an inter-ministerial committee responsible for the refugees’ resettlement, headed by the Director General of the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption and populated by directors of the Ministry of Labor and Welfare, the Ministry of Construction and Housing, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Aliya Department at the Jewish Agency, as well as representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.35 In an article entitled “Cabinet Agrees to Admit-100 Vietnamese Refugees to Israel, Also Discusses Problem of the Falashas,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reports that the Cabinet vote on the question of Vietnamese refugee absorption was 11-2 with four abstentions: Religious Affairs Minister Aharon Abu Hatzeira of the National Religious Party and Housing Minister Gideon Patt of Likud voted against the airlift on grounds that Israel should not become involved in a refugee problem that was beyond its ability to solve. Three of the four abstaining were Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan, Interior Minister Yosef Burg and Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon. The fourth minister abstaining was not identified. The majority of the Cabinet, however, felt Israel should set a moral example in this instance.36 Following the announcement, Jewish Agency representative Yehuda Weissberger was dispatched to Manila from Bombay to help select the refugees to be offered asylum in Israel. On 14 January 1979, Weissberger told a Reuters reporter that the sight of the Tung An was “tragically reminiscent” of the more than sixty refugee boats he remembered coming to Israel after World War II.37 However, the Tung An “is far worse than almost any boat which brought refugees to Israel in the 1940s except perhaps for the famous refugee ship Exodus,” which was turned away from Palestine by the then-British Mandate authorities. Weissberger asserted that in 1979, “everyone in Israel was unanimous in welcoming those refugees.” Furthermore, he claimed (perhaps disingenuously, as will be explained below) that “If they were not Vietnamese, but other refugees, we would still take some, because we have suffered so greatly as refugees ourselves and cannot remain indifferent and watch the sufferings of our fellow beings crowded on a refugee ship.” In reality, Weissberger had been instructed in private to select refugees who were working professionals, had foreign language skills, and were part of young families; in turn, he was to avoid unmarried adults or orphans.38 The group Weissberger ended up selecting were all of ethnic Chinese background and middle-class status. Thus, the second wave of Vietnamese refugees—103 in total (fifteen families)—was transported to Israel from the Philippines two years after the first group. On 24 January 1979, the refugees boarded a KLM plane in Manila, transferred to an El-Al plane in Athens, and landed in Tel Aviv, where they were driven to an absorption center in Afula, an agricultural town in Jezreel Valley in northern Israel.39 After several months, they found jobs at the Ford Factory in

117 Nazareth, the dairy factory at Kibbutz Tel Yosef, and Afula Hospital, and moved into more permanent government-subsidized housing in upper Afula. This group integrated relatively smoothly into Israeli society, though they still faced some discrimination for their non-Jewish status. For example, although the refugees were promised tax exemptions for the first six months by a representative of the Absorption Ministry in Haifa, the local tax evaluation clerk olim) with עולימ) disagreed, insisting that the tax exemption was only given to Jewish immigrants an oleh certificate.40 Furthermore, although the refugees were promised three months of Hebrew language instruction, their ulpan classes were cut short after just one and a half months, forcing the refugees to take on working-class jobs inferior to the ones that they had held in Vietnam as middle-class professionals. After the absorption of 103 refugees from Tung An, thousands of Vietnamese refugees remained in Manila, their fates left in limbo.41 Cabinet Secretary Arye Naor stressed that the gesture was largely symbolic, meant to encourage “other nations to follow.”42 Echoing a similar sentiment, the Committee of Interior Ecology announced: “Israel should serve as an example to richer, bigger, and more developed countries which did not display generosity and did not agree to allow displaced people to enter their countries.”43 Israel’s humanitarian gesture was not only directed inwards, reflecting a Jewish moral imperative, but also outwards, towards an international audience. When announcing the Cabinet’s decision in January, Naor echoed Begin in citing the Holocaust: “We remember the experience of our brethren during World War II who were seeking in vain for shelter.”44 Likewise, in a telegram dated 1 February 1979, Minister of Foreign Affairs Moshe Dayan thanked the UN High Commissioner of Refugees, Poul Hartling, for the UN’s assistance in transferring the Vietnamese refugees, “whose ordeal reminds of the ships carrying Jews around the world, during the darkest hours of our history.”45 Once again, the Vietnamese refugee crisis was translated into a particular Jewish refugee context, emphasizing Israel’s position as a historic victim—a nation of refugees—over its coexisting role as an oppressor—a settler colonial state. As the title of the JTA article quoted above highlights, the Cabinet’s decision to accept Vietnamese refugees contrasts with its heated discussion of the Black Ethiopian Jews who had been the principal victims of internecine warfare ever since Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie had been deposed in 1974 and replaced by a military regime. Although the Israeli rabbinate had decided in 1975 that the Ethiopian Jews were indeed “legitimate” Jews, the government had been slow to act, prompting Ethiopian Israeli protesters to hold a demonstration in Jerusalem on 8 January 1979. Shouting “Begin, hear our voice and save our brothers” in Amharic, they waved signs that read “S-O-S” and “Begin Let My People Come.”46 The Ethiopian Jewish case was complicated by not only the Israeli government’s support of the Ethiopian government in its war with the Arab-backed Somalis, and by extension Emperor Haile Selassie’s policy of rejecting Ethiopian Jewish immigration to Israel, but also by the unnamed specter of race and Israel’s latent racial politics of anti-Blackness.47 The exceptionalism of the Vietnamese refugee case is thus emphasized: not only were Vietnamese refugees absorbed while Palestinian refugees were expelled, and given resettlement benefits similar to those of Jewish immigrants, but they were also offered asylum quicker than this group of Ethiopian Jews, who shared a religious background with the Israeli Jews but lacked the preferred whiteness implicit in the Zionist project. It would not be until the 1980-90s that Israel would engage in large scale operations, such as Operation Solomon in 1991, to bring Ethiopian Jews to Israel. Vietnamese Israelis therefore exist in an uneasy “third space” created by a “racial triangulation” of Israeli Jews and

118 Arab Palestinians, as well white Ashkenazi Jews and Black Ethiopian Jews (two binaries that erase the presence of those caught in between, such as Arab Jews, the Mizrahim).48 After the first two waves of Vietnamese refugee absorption, Israel was hesitant to accept additional refugees. By the late 1970s, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)— including Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia—expressed concern over the unexpectedly large influx of boat refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and the slow rate of refugee resettlement in Western countries.49 On 25 May 1979, UN Secretary- General Kurt Waldheim sent an urgent telegram to world leaders regarding the need for more financial contributions and increased commitments to refugee absorption.50 In a response to Waldheim dated 5 June 1979, Begin wrote that Israel would send an additional financial contribution to the UNHCR, but that it was unable to accept more Southeast Asian refugees at the time, given the “heavy burden laid on Israel in providing a home and shelter for Jewish immigrants and refugees” via the Right of Return.51 In his letter Begin made sure to remind Waldheim of Israel’s absorption of the first two waves of Vietnamese refugees, and again reiterate Israel’s special connection to the Southeast Asian refugee crisis at hand: “The grave and compelling humanitarian problem arouses profound sympathy and understanding amongst our people, with its own history and experience of persecution and homelessness. The Jewish People is uniquely familiar with the tragedy of the unwanted refugee and his plight.” An escalation in the refugee crisis stirred Begin to action just two weeks later though. On 18 June 1979, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, whose country was overwhelmed by the unabated influx of Southeast Asian refugees to already overcrowded camps, wrote to UN Secretary- General Waldheim that Malaysia would no longer accept additional boat refugees: “Any boat carrying Vietnamese illegal immigrants that tries to enter Malaysia waters and attempts to land will be towed away and given assistance to proceed on its journey.”52 Furthermore, refugees currently residing in Malaysia who were not accepted by resettlement countries or their country of origin would be expelled, “the only alternative to their being left to rot in the camps.” Rumors spread that Malaysian officials would start shooting boat refugees to deter their arrival. Alarmed, the UN High Commissioner of Refugees Poul Hartling called for an emergency international conference in Geneva. In a letter sent to world leaders dated 19 June 1979, Begin proposed an alternative plan: responding to this “horrific tragedy,” which he called the contemporary generation’s “Holocaust,” Begin urged state leaders to write directly to Hartling to profess a commitment to absorb a portion of the Southeast Asian refugees in Malaysia, proportionate to the state’s “size of territory and population.”53 Such a plan would expedite the process towards a humanitarian solution. Begin expressed his suspicion of international conferences, which he deemed an “exercise in futility,” given the past inefficiency of such to respond to the Holocaust refugees of World War II: “As a Jew I cannot forget the useless conferences at Evian [in 1938] and Bermuda [in 1943], whose end results were the non-saving of even one Jewish child out of the one-and-a-half million Jewish children who were dragged to wanton death. Among the Vietnamese refugees there are many children and they, too, may lose their lives until such a time as an international conference convenes, until its deliberations get under way and until its resolutions are adopted.”54 The rhetorical significance of this letter is twofold. First, Begin again translated the Southeast Asian refugee crisis into a longer history of Jewish refugee crisis, framing the contemporary mass displacement as a second Holocaust. In this way he established a special connection between Jewish refugees and Vietnamese refugees.55 Second, Begin projected the impression of taking an initiative in regards to the present refugee crisis, while also limiting the demographic requirements imposed on Israel: as a

119 small country, Israel would not be expected to absorb as many refugees as larger Western nations. Such critique of Begin’s rhetoric does not preclude an acknowledgment of his sincerity, however. The plight of Vietnamese refugees evidently affected Begin profoundly; even after the first event of refugee absorption, Begin expressed special interest in following the case and in urging his fellow heads of state to take humanitarian action. Begin sent his letter of proposal to U.S. President Jimmy Carter, the UNHCR in Geneva, and 49 prime ministers. He received replies from countries as diverse as Samoa, Italy, the Dominican Republic, Singapore, Papua New Guinea, Japan, Australia, Luxemburg, Colombia, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Greece, Lesotho, Finland, Jamaica, Germany, Canada, Singapore, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Chile.56 At Begin’s urging, Israel’s Knesset (legislative branch) also unanimously approved a similarly-worded resolution on 20 June 1979: “In the name of a nation that in this generation has experienced the most terrible of all holocausts, the Knesset calls upon all parliaments to take action towards the acceptance and absorption of the Vietnamese refugees.”57 Waldheim responded that he thought that an international conference would still be prudent, and asked Begin whether his government would comply.58 Begin telegrammed his agreement to participate in the conference, which would take place from 20-21 July 1979 in Geneva, though he again expressed concerns that the conference would be a tragic repeat of Evian and Bermuda.59 On 1 July 1979, following the UNHCR’s request, Begin’s administration committed to absorbing an additional 200 refugees.60 Refugees from this third group were hand-selected. In August 1979, A. Ben-Yohanan, Director of the Asia and Oceania Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, directed Yehuda Weissberger, the Jewish Agency representative station in Bombay, to travel back to Southeast Asia to select an additional 200 refugees for Israel to absorb. The initial plan was to absorb 63 relatives of Vietnamese refugees already absorbed into Israel—most of who were stationed in the Malaysian refugee camps—and to select an additional 120 refugees from the Philippines.61 The completion of the 200-refugee quota would be done soon after, once the number of family reunification cases had been confirmed. However, the majority of specified refugees from Malaysia refused to go to Israel, and the others were untraceable.62 Furthermore, when Weissberger reached the Philippines, he judged that most of the “good” refugees were gone, absorbed by the U.S. and Australia, and only “problematic families” that had been rejected by other resettlement states remained.63 Weissberger’s dismissal of “problematic families” referred to single parents, orphans, widows: individuals who posed a threat not only to a constructed sense of heteronormative nuclear morality, but also to the fiction of racial purity. “Incomplete” families conjured the spectral threat of miscegenation, which would disrupt an ever-fragile Jewish national identity. Refugee widows would marry Jewish partners; Jewish parents would have to adopt refugee orphans. Complete nuclear families of refugees, in contrast, would assumingly remain self- contained. Although the Israeli state purportedly embraced the Vietnamese refugees as equal citizens, this humanitarian gesture was underwritten with the historic Jewish obsession with endogamy and attendant anxieties regarding racial perversion—a concern about preserving the Jewish bloodline that inadvertently reproduced the “yellow peril” rhetoric that dominated Asian racialization in the North American context. Although he spent a month interviewing hundreds of refugees in Manila, Weissberger ended up only selecting 55 refugees (13 families) from Camp Palawan in the Philippines. Pressured to complete Israel’s quota of 200 refugees, Weissberger sent a flurry of telegrams to various ministries in Israel, and received permission to visit the camps in Thailand and Hong

120 Kong as well.64 At the Sonkhla refugee camp in Thailand, however, Weissberger encountered a similar situation: “90% of the residents were selected by the U.S. (that began to absorb at a rate of 6000 a month) and what was left were fractures of families,” who had been waiting in the camps for months, passed over by other resettlement countries.65 Furthermore, no refugees expressed interest in traveling to Israel, since only a few had even heard of the country before, so Weissberger had to advertise Israel’s offer (in Chinese) using the local radio station.66 Of the group of refugees that finally expressed interest in immigrating to Israel, 35% were infected with tuberculosis and twelve had leprosy, so that in the end, Israel accepted only 63 refugees (19 families) from Thailand. Weissberger then proceeded to Kai Tak Camp in Hong Kong, where he found “exemplary order, discipline and control of the residents, which were clearly missing in the previous three countries.”67 However, there he faced two other difficulties: first, the heads of refugee families were required to go out and work for their sustenance, so Weissberger encountered only women and children in the camp. Second, very few refugees desired to go to Israel, which they viewed as a war-stricken country, so Weissberger had to distribute publicity pamphlets, which included positive testimonies from the second wave of refugees in Afula, to encourage interest. Of those who eventually expressed interest in resettling in Israel, 41 passed the required medical tests and were accepted by Weissberger. However, on the day of departure, a woman went into labor, so her family was left behind and told to petition for immigration to Israel at a later date; in the end, Israel absorbed 38 people (9 families) from Kai Tak Camp. Meanwhile, in mid-September 1979, the Israeli ship ZIM Sydney, steered by Captain Ilo Eidelstein, was directed by a two-motored American scout plane to a nearby boat of 41 refugees.68 The Israeli ship dropped the Vietnamese refugees off in Singapore, with the promise to absorb them if no other state would take them. Although the Israeli government initially decided that the 41 refugees would not count towards the 200-refugee quota, they soon changed their minds, once they encountered the difficulties in finding other refugees to suit their purposes.69 Furthermore, the 41 refugees initially refused to move to Israel and unanimously demanded to be absorbed by the U.S.. However, after a “vigorous publicity action,” Israel was “saved . . . from disgrace,” and the refugees complied.70 On 22 October 1979, the total group of 197 refugees from the Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Singapore was flown from Bangkok via Athens to Israel, where they were housed in a new absorption center in Sderot.71 Interestingly, Israel did not end up absorbing any refugees directly from Malaysia—the country that had precipitated Begin’s call to absorb additional refugees in the first place. As with the second wave of refugees, this third wave of refugees was chosen based on Israel’s discriminatory preferences. In a series of telegrams, the Israeli committee in charge of Vietnamese refugee absorption instructed Weissberger to select refugees of ethnic Chinese descent, but avoid those from Cambodia or Laos.72 Such comments conflate ethnicity with class: Israel favored the second wave of refugees from Vietnam who were of both ethnic Chinese descent and a commercial background.73 Given their relatively easy absorption into Israeli society, the department requested refugees of similar upbringing: those who would not disrupt Jewish society, who would not drain the socialist state’s resources, and whom the state could uphold as examples of successful resettlement. But such preferences reproduced global hierarchies regarding which refugees were considered worthy of care: refugees from Laos and Cambodia were often overlooked in favor of refugees from Vietnam, given the visibility of the controversial Vietnam War and the relative invisibility of President Nixon’s “Secret War” in Laos and Cambodia.74 Furthermore, ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs in Vietnam were often wealthier and more educated than ethnic Vietnamese refugees from the countryside; the former

121 refugees would require fewer resources from the state for successful resettlement. Such explicit ethnic preferences suggest that Israel was motivated by not only a humanitarian impulse and a particular Jewish empathy for the situation; many Holocaust refugees that were denied asylum in other countries, after all, were similarly of underprivileged ethnic and class backgrounds. The Israeli state’s actions were also driven by the potential for effective resettlement—the potential for a non-disruptive absorption of refugees into the predominantly Jewish body politic. In the end, the Israeli committee would be disappointed: the third group of refugees consisted of mostly ethnic Vietnamese families of working class background, who had worked as fishermen and farmers in Vietnam.75 The third wave of refugees was met with mixed reactions. The director of the Absorption Ministry, Azriel Veldman, and the head of the Sderot Council, Amos Hanania, accompanied Vietnamese refugees from the first two waves in welcoming the third group of refugees at the airport.76 The local school children of Sderot gave the newcomers red roses and Israeli flags. However, some Jewish residents expressed resentment at the Vietnamese refugees’ special treatment: “It hurts me to see that they are bringing here non-Jews that will get better apartments than ours.” Like the first two waves, the third wave of Vietnamese refugees did not qualify though for all the rights granted olim under the Law of Return.77 During and after the three waves of Vietnamese refugee absorption, Israel attempted to use the humanitarian acts to help promote a positive image of Israel around the world, as evidenced by a number of telegrams sent from 1977 to 1980.78 For example, in December 1978, Kastel Films wrote to the Israel Film Service with a proposal to create a film about the absorption of the first wave of refugees, which would have great “propaganda value”: “We are talking specifically about a positive ‘publicity film’ whose aim is to show the attractive side of Israel, without disguises and reservations, as a nation of refugees ready to give shelter to other refugees from a distant country, without having any cultural, religious or ethnic connection with them.”79 Likewise, after Israel’s declaration of intent to absorb the second wave of refugees, Avi Pazner, chancellor at the Embassy of Israel in Washington, D.C. and head of the Foreign Ministry’s Press Division, wrote to the Israel’s Department of Journalism and Publicity and the Government Press Office: “It would be of much use for our image if the arrival of the refugees to Israel will receive wide coverage on the media, particularly the television networks. I suggest we think how to bring about maximum coverage, including interviews with refugees who will express their thanks to the state of Israel for the humanitarian gesture.”80 Conversely, Israeli leaders sought to publicize international press that derided the Arab Gulf States for not, in comparison, contributing to solving the Southeast Asian refugee crisis.81 Israel was not the only country to translate the Southeast refugee crisis of the late 1970s into the context of the Holocaust refugeehood of World War II.82 In his speech to the UN Conference on Indochinese Refugees in Geneva on 21 July 1979, for example, U.S. Vice President Walter F. Mondale also invoked the Evian conference of 1938 to frame his remarks: “If each nation at Evian had agreed on that day to take in 17,000 Jews at once, every Jew in the Reich could have been saved.”83 However, the “civilized world” “failed the test of civilization,” and days later, “the ‘final solution to the Jewish problem’ was conceived.” Calling upon his colleagues to “alleviate the tragedy in Southeast Asia,” Mondale pleaded: “Let us not re-enact their error. Let us not be the heirs to their shame.” Comparisons like these between Jewish refugees and Southeast Asian refugees were made at the expense of Palestinian refugees, as a short article in the Jerusalem Post dated 18 June 1979 makes explicit. The article begins by comparing the expulsion of ethnic Chinese minorities from Vietnam with the genocide of Jews in

122 Europe, and ends by calling on the United Nations to turn its attention away from Palestinians, who do not constitute a “real” refugee problem: The UN’s refugee effort has for long been bogged down in the political entanglements of the Palestinian refugees, whose problem it is committed, under pressure from the Arab world, not to solve. It would be refreshing, for a change, if it devoted its energies to a real refugee problem that urgently requires the saving of tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives.84 Blaming Arab nations for exacerbating the Palestinian refugee situation by insisting upon the Right of Return, this article pits Palestinian refugees against Southeast Asian refugees in a competition of the UN’s limited resources. Such rhetoric would also position Vietnamese Israelis as refugee settlers: those whose rights and benefits in the settler colonial state of Israel are predicated upon the structural elimination of displaced native Palestinians.

Vietnamese Israelis Today: Refugee Representation, Translation, and Refusal After the passage of 197 Vietnamese refugees to Sderot in October 1979, Israel did not absorb any more refugees from Southeast Asia, refusing even family reunification requests.85 Since then, Israel has granted asylum to only four other non-Jewish populations: a group of 84 Bosnia Muslim refugees in 1993, who were granted temporary residence in Israel until the end of the Bosnian War (a humanitarian act that was critiqued for directing attention away from the contemporaneous deportation of 400 Palestinian Muslims); a group of 112 Albanian Muslim refugees from the Balkan War in 1999, who were granted six months tourist visas but not absorbed like the Vietnamese; a group of 5,895 Lebanese Christians (Southern Lebanon Army members and their families) in 2000, following Israel’s withdrawal from Southern Lebanon; and a group of 500 Sudanese asylum seekers, who were granted temporary residency permits in 2007.86 None of these groups were considered “convention refugees,” meaning that their translation into Israel was structured not by the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, but rather by legal exception and pardon, denying any form of legal precedent. More often, asylum seekers to Israel are denied entry, imprisoned, granted temporary residence but forbidden to work or apply for citizenship, or deported (sometimes under the banner of “voluntary repatriation”).87 Today, asylum seekers come from three main regions: the majority from African countries (mostly Ethiopia and Eritrea, but also Sudan, Congo, Liberia, Ghana, and Somalia); a few from Europe (such as Yugoslavia, Russia, and Ukraine); and a more recent surge from Syria.88 Given Israel’s strict asylum policy, and its ongoing settlement and occupation of Palestine, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Vietnamese Israeli case continues to be re-cited in the contemporary context. A 2015 article in the Los Angeles Times entitled “One Country that Won’t Be Taking Syrian Refugees: Israel,” and a 2017 feature essay in Foreign Policy entitled “Inside Israel’s Secret Program to Get Rid of African Refugees,” for example, both reference Prime Minister Begin’s 1977 absorption of the sixty-six refugees in their critique of Israel’s contemporary asylum decisions, establishing a point of contrast.89 (Notably, these two articles fail to acknowledge the subsequent two waves of Vietnamese refugee absorption.) Zionist writers cite the Vietnamese refugee case as well, though with the intention of promoting a more positive imagine of Israel in the international sphere. In 2012, for example, both Shoshana Bryen’s “Israel and the Boat People” in The Times of Israel and Menucha Chana Levin’s “Vietnamese Boat People in the Promised Land: Memories of Holocaust Refugees, but with a Different Ending” on aish.com, a Jerusalem-based Jewish-content website launched in

123 2000, commemorated the thirty-fifth anniversary of the arrival of the first Vietnamese refugees in 1977.90 Both articles portrayed Israel sympathetically, and both echo earlier rhetoric that translates the Vietnamese case into a longer narrative of Israeli Jewish history. For example, Bryen writes: The experience of Jewish refugees and the hopelessness of statelessness made Israel sensitive to the hopelessness of people from another place, another culture, another war, giving the Vietnamese a place to start over. (For those rolling their eyes on behalf of stateless Palestinian refugees: It is precisely the Jewish experience with statelessness that impels Israel to continue to seek a mechanism by which Palestinians can achieve the state the Arab states declined on their behalf in 1948 – without losing the State of Israel.)91 Here we see a hint of defensiveness in response to criticisms of Israel’s policy towards Palestinian refugees, and the liberal Israeli proposal of a two-state solution that refuses to acknowledge the foundational settler colonialism of Israel. Sarit Catz’s 2012 article “On Refugees and Racism, a Double Standard Against Israel,” published by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA)—a media-monitoring, research and membership organization that purports to promote “accurate” and “balanced” coverage of Israel and the Middle East, in response to all the perceived media slights against Israel—is more explicitly defensive. In response to recent press releases by major news sources—such as Reuters, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Financial Times, ABC, CNN, CBC, BBC and others—that have critiqued Israel for the recent repatriation of undocumented African migrants, Catz offered examples of Israel’s benevolence towards racialized refugees, such as the “black Ethiopian Jews” in the 1980-90s and the Vietnamese in the 1970s. 92 (Catz’s use of italics here is pointed, as well as her vehement assertion that “Never before had black Africans been taken from Africa, not from freedom to slavery but from slavery to freedom. No other nation has ever done that. Only Israel.”) Some Zionist writers cite the Vietnamese case to critique the Israeli state’s recent asylum decisions, in order to advocate for a more liberal representation of Israel. In her 2012 article “I Remember When Israel Rescued Non-Jewish Refugees,” Lisa Goldman juxtaposes a portrait of Eritrean refugees “who were left to bake in the desert sun for a week without food or medical help, while the army prevented activists from bringing food or a physician to examine them” with an image of Israeli benevolence toward the Vietnamese refugees.93 Israeli writer Hillel Halkin, meanwhile, offers a pragmatic solution to the question of Sudanese asylum seekers in his 2007 article “A Shame On Israel.” Chastising Prime Minister Olmert’s unsympathetic response to the Sudanese refugees who had crossed the border from Egypt into Israel, Halkin argues that Olmert should have accepted a small number of Sudanese refugees as a symbolic gesture, akin to the Begin’s move of “pure theater” in the 1970s.94 Halkin agrees with Olmert’s assertion that Israel cannot solve the Sudanese refugee problem—indeed, he believes that Israel already suffers from too high of a population of illegal immigrants and foreign workers (i.e. non-Jews)—but he argues that the absorption of a token amount of Sudanese refugees would counter the already overwhelming amount of negative “propaganda” against Israel.95 Extending Halkin’s argument, Hirsch Goodman bemoans in a 2014 op-ed to the New York Times entitled “Losing the Propaganda War” that “Israel is letting itself be branded an apartheid state — and even encouraging it.”96 In addition to citing the military buildup in the occupied territories as contributing to this negative propaganda, Goodman writes: “Instead of welcoming Eritrean and Sudanese refugees seeking asylum — the way that a former Likud Party prime minister,

124 Menachem Begin, did in 1977 with the Vietnamese boat people, saying they reminded him of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust — Israel is confining today’s asylum-seekers to a camp in the desert, providing reams of footage to those who want to prove Israel is a racist society.”97 Conversely, to accept a token amount of Eritrean and Sudanese refugees in the present would vastly improve Israel’s vexed national image in the international sphere. Such open displays of rhetorical calculation in the contemporary moment shed light on some of the rhetorical considerations at play during the original 1970s moment of Vietnamese refugee absorption into Israel. Some more aggressive Zionist organizations translate the case of Vietnamese refugee absorption into a tool for promoting Israel’s moral superiority in the Middle East.98 For example, BlueStar, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization “dedicated to empowering the next generation of Israel advocates and leaders” distributed a poster asking “Which Middle Eastern Country Provided Refuge and Citizenship to 350 Homeless Vietnamese Desperately Seeking Political Asylum? Only Israel” as part of its “Israel: The oldest democracy in the Middle East” campaign.99 Designed to critique the surrounding Arab nations as a region of “tyranny and unrest,” and align Israel with a Western order of liberal democratic rule, this poster again translates the Vietnamese refugee case into a longer history of Jewish Israeli refugeehood: a visual juxtaposition of the two refugee cases is followed by the quote: “Many Israelis know firsthand what it is like to be shut out from freedom. Despite its small size, Israel has managed to reach out and provide humanitarian relief and aid to others in times of need.” Such assertions of course neglect to account for Israel’s longer history of strict asylum policy, and its displacement of Palestinian refugees. This transnational Zionist media apparatus has also called upon Vietnamese refugees to corroborate and ventriloquize its narrative of humanitarian benevolence. State documents and media reports from the late 1970s to today depict Vietnamese refugees expressing gratitude and contentment.100 For example, a promotional booklet published in July 1979 by the Department of Information for Olim, Office of the Spokesman, and stamped by the State of Israel Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, includes three letters of gratitude from refugees.101 Including side-by- side translations of English and French, the pamphlet is entitled “The Absorption of Vietnamese Refugees: The Israel Experience/L’Integration des Refugies Vietnamiens: L’expérience d’Israël.” Writing on behalf of the first wave of refugees, Dr. Tran Quang Hoa, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, expresses the group’s “deep thanks and deep gratitude coming from our heart and our mind.” He reports that after two years, all members of the first group have settled in the Tel Aviv region in “houses provided by the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption and by the administration of the places where people are working,” and that “we all feel happy and satisfied with our social and professional life in the places where we are living.” He concludes: “We always remember that we owe all our success to the generosity of the people and the Government of Israel.”102 Nonetheless, the archive does evidence examples of quotidian resistance on the part of the Vietnamese refugees: moments of slippage, in which the Israeli state and its apologists cannot orchestrate the proper refugee response towards the humanitarian act of absorption.103 As discussed in the previous section, Yehuda Weissberger encountered many examples of refugee refusal on his quest to select the third wave of refugees: refusal to not only go to Israel, but more importantly to conform to the script of the good refugee, grateful for the offer of asylum in a Western nation. This report is corroborated with interviews I conducted with Vietnamese Israelis, who confirmed that Israel was not their first choice of resettlement; most wanted to go to

125 the United States, but Israel promised them a faster processing of paperwork.104 Furthermore, once refugees were absorbed into Israel, they were disqualified for parole status to the United States. More recently, second generation Vietnamese Israelis have begun to express media fatigue: a frustration that the media constantly turns to them to evidence Israel’s humanitarian benevolence during times of crisis. This is evidenced in Simona Weinglass’s 2015 article entitled “35 Years On, Where are Israel’s Vietnamese Refugees?”, which responds to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent refusal to offer asylum to Syrian refugees.105 What is striking about this particular article, however, is how it veers in style from previous articles of this genre. The author, Simona Weinglass, openly details her difficulty in finding Vietnamese Israeli informants. She scouts out a restaurant owned by ethnic Chinese refugees from Vietnam in Bat Yam, for example, but the husband and wife refuse to talk to her: Asked if he could be interviewed, a 50-ish Vietnamese man smoking outside said, “No, I am just a cook, go inside and talk to the management.” Inside, a woman who appeared to be his wife, said in fluent Hebrew, “No, my Hebrew is not good enough.” Why do you think people in the Vietnamese community are so reluctant to be interviewed? The woman smiles and shrugs. Is it because you want to be left in peace? The woman nods, a glint of assent in her eye, then looks away. The conversation is over.106 Weinglass messages twenty Vietnamese Israelis over Facebook, but only one responds with “Hi! I’m not interested, thanks.”107 She also contacts Vaan Nguyen, but Nguyen “declines an interview on the subject of Vietnamese refugees,” saying she would rather be interviewed regarding her book of poetry.108 Nguyen explains: “Whenever there is a humanitarian crisis somewhere, I get calls from various media outlets asking to interview me about the refugee experience. I don’t feel like a refugee. I’m the daughter of refugees.”109 Nguyen bears witness to the media’s frequent attempts to recuperate Israel’s image of liberal humanitarianism by translating the narrative of Vietnamese refugee absorption into the context of debates regarding Israel’s contemporary asylum policies. Yet she resists, refusing to participate in the performance.

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1 Most sources identify Yuvali as an Israeli cargo ship. See for example Shoshana Bryen, “Israel and the Boat People,” The Times of Israel (Jerusalem), 6 January 2012, http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/israel-and-the-boat-people. A series of telegrams sent from the various Israeli ministries provide more details: the ship was owned by the Israeli firm Ofer, steered by an Israeli captain and crew, but flew a Liberian flag of convenience. See Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Telegram 151 to Washington DC,” 10 June 1977, Israel State Archives, translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Ministry of ,חצ – Vietnamese Refugees File, 5733/29 Foreign Affairs, “Secret Telegram 943,” 12 June 1977, Israel State Archives, Vietnamese ,translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Israeli Embassy in Japan ,חצ – Refugees File, 5733/29 ,חצ – Telegram 62,” 17 June 1977, Israel State Archives, Vietnamese Refugees File, 5733/29“ translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Secret Telegram,” 19 June translated from Hebrew by ,חצ – Israel State Archives, Vietnamese Refugees File, 5733/29 ,1977 Kobi Fisher. 2 “66 Vietnam Refugees Find Asylum in Israel,” The Victoria Advocate (Victoria, TX), 26 June 1977, 2A. 3 Israel spent a couple weeks debating the question of refugee absorption. Initially, it was hoped that the U.S. would absorb the refugees. When this plan fell through, Israel realized it would have to absorb the refugees or risk bad publicity, especially regarding the Jewish refugees’ history of being turned away during World War II. There was also some concern regarding the fact the once Israel absorbed the Vietnamese refugees, they would be ineligible for parole to the United States. See Ben Zur, “Secret Telegram 373,” 24 June 1977, Israel State Archives, translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Ben Zur, “Top ,חצ – Vietnamese Refugees File, 5733/29 Secret, Urgent Telegram 297,” 23 June 1977, Israel State Archives, Vietnamese Refugees File, translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher. For more the first wave of refugees, see ,חצ – 5733/29 Department of Information for Olim, Office of the Spokesman, “The Absorption of Vietnamese Refugees: The Israel Experience/ L’Integration des Refugies Vietnamiens: L’expérience Ministry of ;חע – d’Israël,” July 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 Immigrant Absorption, Office of the Spokesman, “The Story of the Absorption of the Vietnam .חע – Refugees,” 1 January 1980, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 4 The exact numbers of Vietnamese refugees who were absorbed by Israel remains inconsistent across government documents and media reports. Most sources report that 370 refugees total were absorbed. Some documents report that the second wave consisted of 103 refugees, and some report 102. Although Israel set out to accept 200 refugees for the third wave, they actually accepted 197. The number 366 comes from 66 refugees in the first wave, 103 in the second, and 197 in the third. 5 “66 Vietnam Refugees Find Asylum in Israel.” 6 In his welcome speech address to Prime Minister Begin, President Jimmy Carter also drew connections between the Vietnamese refugees and the Israeli Jews: “I was particularly impressed that the first official action of [Begin’s] government was to admit into Israel sixty-six homeless refugees from Vietnam who had been floating around in the oceans of the world, excluded by many nations who are their neighbors, who had been picked up by an Israeli ship and to whom he gave a home. It was an act of compassion, an act of sensitivity, and a recognition of him and his government about the importance of a home for people who are destitute and who would like to express their own individuality and freedom in a common way, again typifying the historic

127 struggle of the people of Israel.” See Jimmy Carter and Menachem Begin, “Visit of Prime Minister Menahem Begin of Israel Remarks of the President and the Prime Minister at the Welcoming Ceremony,” White House Lawn, 1977, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=7825. 7 Candace Fujikane, “Against the Yellowwashing of Israel: The BDS Movement and Liberatory Solidarities across Settler States,” in Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, ed. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 150–71. For a critique of Israel’s manipulation of humanitarian rhetoric in the context on Israel’s attack on Palestinians during the Gaza War of 2008-09, see Rebecca L. Stein, “Impossible Witness: Israeli Visuality, Palestinian Testimony and the Gaza War,” Journal for Cultural Research 16, no. 2–3 (2012): 135–53. Stein coins the concept “humanitarian alibi” to identify how the Israeli media drowned out Palestinian voices and viewpoints, while focusing on the figure of the humanitarian Israeli who mourned the loss of the “good Palestinian” caught up in the violence allegedly initiated unilaterally by Hamas. 8 Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’i (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008); Yu-ting Huang, “Between Sovereignties: Chinese Minor Settler Literature Across the Pacific” (UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015); Karen J. Leong and Myla Vicenti Carpio, eds., “Carceral States,” Amerasia Journal 42, no. 1 (2016): vi–152; Dean Itsuji Saranillio, “Why Asian Settler Colonialism Matters: A Thought Piece on Critiques, Debates, and Indigenous Difference,” Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3–4 (2013): 280–94; Dean Itsuji Saranillio, “Colliding Histories: Hawai’i Statehood at the Intersections of Asians ‘Ineligible to Citizenship’ and Hawaiians ‘Unfit for Self- Government’’,’” Journal of Asian American Studies 13, no. 3 (October 2010): 283–309; Juliana Hu Pegues, “Empire, Race, and Settler Colonialism: BDS and Contingent Solidarities,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016): Web; Junaid Rana and Diane C. Fujino, “Taking Risks, Or The Question of Palestine Solidarity and Asian American Studies,” American Quarterly 67, no. 4 (2015): 1027–37; Sunaina Maira and Magid Shihade, “Meeting Asian/Arab Studies: Thinking Race, Empire, and Zionism in the U.S.,” Journal of Asian American Studies 9, no. 2 (2006): 117–40; Fujikane, “Against the Yellowwashing of Israel: The BDS Movement and Liberatory Solidarities across Settler States.” 9 Yến Lê Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(Es) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 174. 10 Smadar Lavie, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture, First edition (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 1–4, 42-46. Begin Mandates the Absorption of Vietnamese) ”בגין מורה לקלוט עשרות פליטים וייטנאמים“ 11 Refugees), Ha’aretz, 24 June 1977, Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa, eds., Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). education/1.1267511. English translated quoted from Adriana X. Jacobs, “Where You Are From: The Poetry of Vaan Nguyen,” Shofar 33, no. 4 (2015): 84. Emphasis added. 12 Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, “Press Release REF/1358, High Comissioner Stresses Universality of Refugee Problems in Speech to Executive Committee,” 9 Oct. 1978, .חע – Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 13 Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, “Press Release REF/1365, UNHCR Executive Committee Takes Decision Concerning Refugees in Southern Africa and South East Asia as well

128 as Displaced Persons in Lebanon,” 17 Oct. 1978, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, See also UN General Assembly, “Report on the Twenty-ninth Session of the .חע – 7248/29 Executive Committee of the High Commissioner’s Programme,” 20 Oct. 1978, “Section IV— .חע – UNHCR Assistance Activities,” p. 20, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 14 Eviatar Manor, Geneva Delegate to the UNHCR, “Report on the Thirtieth Session of the ,חע – Executive Committee of the UNCHR,” Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher, 17 Oct. 1979. 15 For more on UNRWA and its relation to the 1951 Refugee Convention, see the special issue of Refugee Survey Quarterly entitled “UNRWA and the Palestinian Refugees 60 Years Later.” 16 Interestingly, however, in 1948 the six Arab League countries then represented at the UN – Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen—actually voted against UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which resolved that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.” 17 Kurt Rene Radley, “The Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return in International Law,” The American Journal of International Law 72, no. 3 (July 1978): 609. General Assembly Resolution 3236, 29 GAOR, Supp. (No. 31) 4, UN Doc. A/9631 (1974). 18 Ilana Feldman, “The Challenge of Categories: UNRWA and the Definition of a ‘Palestine Refugee,’” Journal of Refugee Studies 25, no. 3 (2012): 392. 19 Feldman, 392. 20 “66 Vietnam Refugees Find Asylum in Israel,” The Victoria Advocate, June 26, 1977. 21 Quoted in Shoshana Bryen, “Israel and the Boat People,” Times of Israel, January 6, 2012, http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/israel-and-the-boat-people. 22 Department of Information for Olim, Office of the Spokesman, “The Absorption of Vietnamese Refugees: The Israel Experience/L’Integration des Refugies Vietnamiens: .חע – L’expérience d’Israël,” July 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 23 Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, Office of the Spokesman, “The Story of the Absorption of .חע – the Vietnam Refugees,” 1 Jan. 1980, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 24 See, for example, “66 Vietnam Refugees Find Asylum in Israel,” The Victoria Advocate (Victoria, TX), June 26, 1977, 2A; Shoshana Bryen, “Israel and the Boat People,” The Times of Israel (Jerusalem), January 6, 2012; Jonathan Immanuel, “Today’s Focus: Vietnamese Refugees Adjust to Life in the Jewish State,” The Associated Press (New York City, NY), January 3, 1986; Menucha Chana Levin, “Vietnamese Boat People in the Promised Land: Memories of Holocaust Refugees, but with a Different Ending,” aish.com (Jerusalem), November 19, 2011. 25 This Resolution was later revoked in 1991 in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/48, which Israel demanded as a condition for its participation in the Madrid Peace Conference. 26 Ze’ev Yeffet, “‘China Town’ in Afula,” Ha’aretz, 26 Oct. 1979. Clipping found in the Israel .translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher ,חע – State Archives 105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 27 Neta Atanaski, Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Yen Le Espiritu, “The ‘We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome: US Press Coverage of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the ‘Fall of Saigon,’” American Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2006): 329-352.

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28 Daniel Bloch, “The Government Decided to Permit the Entry of a 100 Refugees from ,חע – Vietnam,” Davar, 8 Jan. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher. 29 “Transcript of Knesset Debate on Vietnamese Refugees on the Ship Hai Hong,” 11 Nov. 1978, translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; “Deciding which Committee will Deal with the Procedural Motion of MKs Nof and Shilansky about the Subject of the Problem of the Vietnamese Refugees who are in the Middle of the Sea,” 21 Nov. 1978, translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; “The Conclusions of the Committee of Interior Ecology about the Subject of the Vietnamese Refugees in the Middle of the Sea,” 30 Jan. 1979, translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Dara Marcus, “The Hai Hong Incident: One Boat’s Effect on Canada’s Policy towards Indochinese refugees,” 1-18, http://imrc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Hai-Hong-Paper-for- website.pdf. 30 Ruth Raeli, “Letter to Mr. S. Z. Katz,” 13 Dec. 1978, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; “Statement by Ambassador Joel ,חע – D, 7248/29 Barromi” and “Consultative Meeting with Interested Governments on Refugees and Displaced Persons in South East Asia (Geneva, 11-12 December 1978,” 19 Dec. 1978, Israel State .חע – Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 31 Barromi also said: “It is not good for us now to show indifference to a problem which many compare to the story of the Exodus.” See Joel Barromi, “Telegram 35,” 7 Dec. 1978, Israel State translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Joel ,חע – Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 ,חע – Barromi, “Telegram 82,” 20 Nov. 1978, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher. In another example of dissent, the Israeli Ambassador in Canberra, Australia wrote that the pretense of helping without absorbing any refugees “reminds me as a Jew of the Evian conference 40 years ago.” See Michael Elitsur, “Letter regarding the Special Meeting on Asian Refugees,” 4 Dec. 1978, Israel State Archives, 105.5, .translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher ,חע – Appendix D, 7248/29 32 Eytan Bentsur, Israeli Embassy in Washington DC, “Telegram 386 to the North American Department in Jerusalem,” 22 Nov. 1978, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 – translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; David Lazar, Israeli Embassy in Paris, “Letter to the ,חע Department of Public Affairs, Foreign Ministry, Jerusalem,” 22 Nov. 1978, Israel State Archives, translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Members of Kibbutz ,חע – Appendix D, 7248/29 ,105.5 Lohamei Hagetaot (“Ghetto Warriors”), “The Fate of the Vietnam Refugees is Ours (handwritten note)” Jan. 1979, Israel State Archives, “Committee for the Absorption of Refugees from translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Faculty of Architecture at ,גל – Vietnam,” 9474/19 Technion, Haifa, “Letter in support of Absorption of Vietnamese Refugees,” 2 Jan. 1979, Israel ,גל – State Archives, “Committee for the Absorption of Refugees from Vietnam,” 9474/19 translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher. For a rare letter of protest against absorbing more Vietnamese refugees, see Asher Levkovitz, “Letter to the Minister of Building and Housing, Mr. Yaffe (typewritten) ” 8 Jan. 1979, Israel State Archives, “Committee for the Absorption of .translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher ,גל – Refugees from Vietnam,” 9474/19 33 UNHCR, “Refugees from Indochina: Situation on 31.1.79,” 31 Jan. 1979, Israel State .חע – Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 34 Interesting, it was initially rumored that Israel would accept 400, not 100, refugees. See Ruth ,חע – Raeli, “Telegram 10,” 3 Jan. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher. For more on the acceptance of the second wave of

130 refugees, see Poul Hartling, “Letter to Dr. Joel Barromi, Permanent Representative of Israel to the UN Office at Geneva,” 12 Jan. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 – Hanoch Zimmering, Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, “Summary of the Protocol of ;חע Meeting No. 2 Regarding Bringing Over the Vietnamese Refugees, Held on the 9th of January translated from ,חע – Jan. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 11 ”,1979 Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, Director General’s Office, “Decision-Making Procedures and Treatment of the 100 Refugees from Vietnam, Operation translated ,חע – Paper No. 1,” 14 Jan. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Masok, “Telegram 842,” 9 Jan. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Youssef Waxman, “The ,חע – Appendix D, 7248/29 Government Will Decide Today to Absorb Vietnamese,” Ma’ariv, 7 Jan. 1979, Israel State .translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher ,חע – Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 35 Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, Office of the Spokesman, “The Story of the Absorption of ;חע – the Vietnam Refugees,” 1 January 1980, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 Aryeh Naor, “Government Decision no. 295 Accepting Refugees from Vietnam,” 8 Jan. 1979, ,גל – Israel State Archives, “Committee for the Absorption of Refugees from Vietnam,” 9474/19 translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher. 36 “Cabinet Agrees to Admit-100 Vietnamese Refugees to Israel, Also Discusses Problem of the Falashas,” JTA: The Global Jewish News Source (New York City, NY), 8 Jan. 1979. See also Uzi Benziman, “The Government Decided to Absorb a 100 Refugees from Vietnam,” Ha’aretz, translated from Hebrew by ,חע – Jan. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 8 Kobi Fisher, for more details. 37 Colin Bicker, “Reuter Telegram from Manila Bay, Philippines,” 15 Jan. 1979, Israel State .חע – Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 38 Asia-Pacific Section of the Department of Foreign Affairs (MASOK), “Telegram 510,” 8 Jan. translated from Hebrew by Kobi ,חע – Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 ,1979 Fisher. 39 MASOK, “Telegram 510”; Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, Office of the Spokesman, “Protocol of the Public Relations Committee's Meeting Regarding the Vietnam Refugees Reception Rrocedures in Case of a Landing in Athens,” 16 Jan. 1979, Israel State Archives, translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Ministry of ,חע – Appendix D, 7248/29 ,105.5 Immigrant Absorption and Department of Absorption Services, “Treatment of the Refugee Group from the Moment of Landing: Responsibility and Implementation by the Ministry of Absorption and the Jewish Agency,” 17 Jan. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, ,translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Department of Information for Olim ,חע – 7248/29 Office of the Spokesman, “The Absorption of Vietnamese Refugees: The Israel Experience/L’Integration des Refugies Vietnamiens: L’expérience d’Israël,” July 1979, Israel The KLM actually landed in Dubai before .חע – State Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 traveling onto Athens; therefore, Israeli representatives such as Weissberger had to travel separately to Athens. See Ambassador in Manila, “Telegram 56 to Masok,” 18 Jan. 1979, Israel .translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher ,חע – State Archives,105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 40 Ze’ev Yeffet, “‘China Town’ in Afula,” Ha’aretz, 26 Oct. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, ,translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher. See also Avshalom Ginnat ,חע – Appendix C, 7248/28 “Vietnam Refugees—A Month in Afula,” Al HaMishmar, 15 Feb. 1979, Israel State Archives, .translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher ,חע – Appendix D, 7248/29 ,105.5

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41 “Vietnamese refugees fly to Israel to begin new life near Nazareth,” Eugene Register-Guard (Eugene, OR), January 23, 1979. 42 “Cabinet Agrees to Admit-100 Vietnamese Refugees to Israel Also Discusses Problem of the Falashas.” 43 “The conclusions of the Committee of Interior Ecology about the subject of the Vietnamese refugees in the middle of the sea,” Israel State Archives, Jan. 30, 1979. 44 “The conclusions of the Committee of Interior Ecology about the subject of the Vietnamese refugees in the middle of the sea.” 45 Moshe Dayan, “Telegram 2596,” 1 Feb. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, .חע – 7248/29 46 Dayan, “Telegram 2596.” 47 For more on anti-blackness in the Israeli context, see Justin Leroy, “Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements of Slavery and Settler Colonialism,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016): n.p. See also contemporary critiques of Israel’s treatment of African refugees from Eritrea and Sudan. 48 Homi Bhabha and Jonathan Rutherford, “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 211; Claire Jean Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans,” Politics & Society 27, no. 1 (March 1999): 105–38; Ella Shohat, “Taboo Memories, Diasporic Visions: Columbus, Palestine, and Arab-Jews,” in Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 201–32. 49 “Joint Communique: Twelfth ASEAN Ministerial Meeting,” Bali, Indonesia, 30 June 1979, .חע – Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix B, 7248/27 50 Kurt Waldheim, “Telegram to Menachem Begin,” 25 May 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, .חע – Appendix A, 7248/26 51 Menachem Begin, “Letter to Secretary General Kurt Waldheim,” 5 June 1979, Jerusalem, .Emphasis added .חע – Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix A, 7248/26 52 Prime Minister of Malaysia, “Press Release SG/SM/2735,” 18 June 1979, Israel State .חע – Archives, 105.5, Appendix A, 7248/26 53 Note that it is unclear whether Begin expects the states to follow through on their pronouncements, or whether he hopes the pronouncements themselves—without backing—will be enough to assuage Malaysia’s concerns: “Let each of the 151 sovereign countries of the world contact forthwith the High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, Mr. Poul Hartling, and inform him of its readiness, in principle, to accept a number of the Vietnamese refugees presently in Malaysia relative to size of territory and population. Should Mr. Hartling receive from our governments such pronouncements he will be in a position to inform the Government of Malaysia accordingly and request that the deportations cease. There is no doubt in my mind that the Government of Malaysia would be willing to comply since it would be assured that the problem was being practically tackled with a view to a solution in a matter of weeks or, at the most, months.” See Menachem Begin, “Telegram to Heads of State,” 19 June 1979, Israel State .Emphasis added .חע – Archives, 105.5, Appendix A, 7248/26 54 Begin, “Telegram to Heads of State.” 55 As will be detailed below, this “special connection” did not extend to refugees from Cambodia or Laos. .א – and Begin’s letters, 4346/12 ,חע – See Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix B, 7248/27 56

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57 Aryeh Rubinstein, “Knesset asks worlds’ parliaments: Take in Vietnamese refugees,” Newspaper unknown, 21 June 1979, newspaper clipping in Israel State Archives, 105.5, At Begin’s request, a summation of the Knesset Debate on .חע – Appendix A, 7248/26 Vietnamese Refugees was sent to heads of state around the world. Israel received letters of reply from countries such as Great Britain, Thailand, and Switzerland. See Israel State Archives, .חע – Appendix B, 7248/27 ,105.5 58 Joel Barromi, “Telegram 7083,” 20 June 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix A, ,Poul Hartling, “Telegram 3710,” 27 June 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5 ;חע – 7248/26 Kurt Waldheim, “Letter to Menachem Begin,” 30 June 1979, Israel ;חע – Appendix A, 7248/26 .חע – State Archives, 105.5, Appendix A, 7248/26 59 Menachem Begin, “Telegram 6828 (Letter to Kurt Waldheim),” 4 July 1979, Israel State Kurt Waldheim, “Telegram 7575 (Details of Geneva ;חע – Archives, 105.5, Appendix A, 7248/26 Conference on 20-21 July 1979),” 5 July 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix A, United Nations Press Release, “Statement by United Nations Spokesman on ;חע – 7248/26 .חע – Indochinese Refugees,” 30 June 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix A, 7248/26 60 David Levi, “Letter to Government Secretary Aryeh Naor regarding Vietnam Refugees— Government Decision (no. 854) from 1 July 1979,” 21 Oct. 1979, Israel State Archives, translated from ,גל – Committee for the Absorption of Refugees from Vietnam,” 9474/19“ Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, Office of the Spokesman, “The Story of the Absorption of the Vietnam Refugees,” 1 Jan. 1980, Israel State Archives, 105.5, .חע – Appendix C, 7248/28 61 Asia and Oceania Department, “Telegram 3217 to Geneva, Manila,” 1 Aug. 1979, Israel State translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Asia and ,חע – Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 Oceania Department, “Telegram 4788 to Bangkok,” 20 Aug. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; A. Ben Yohanan, “Letter to ,חע – Appendix C, 7248/28 the Ambassador at Bankok,” 22 Aug. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 – .translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher ,חע 62 “Meanwhile the High Commissioner's representative informed us that out of the 45 required from Malaysia, 36 aren't interested in coming to Israel and 9 hadn't been traced yet.” See Moshe Raviv and Yehuda Weissberger, “Telegram 2335,” 14 Sept. 1979, Israel State Archives,105.5, .translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher ,חע – Appendix C, 7248/28 63 Yehuda Weissberger, “Letter to Azriel Veldman, the Ministry for Immigrant (Aliya) translated ,חע – Absorption,” 26 Oct. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, Spokesman’s Office, “The Story of the Absorption of the Vietnam Refugees,” Jerusalem, 1 Jan. 1980, Israel State Archives, translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher. For more on ,חע – Appendix C, 7248/28 ,105.5 Weissberger’s time in the Philippines, see Moshe Raviv and Yehuda Weissberger, “Telegram translated from ,חע – Sept. 1979, Israel State Archives,105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 14 ”,2335 Hebrew by Kobi Fisher. 64 See for example Moshe Raviv, “Telegram 3374,” 25 Sept. 1979, Israel State Archives,105.5, .translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher ,חע – Appendix C, 7248/28 65 See also Mordechai Lador, “Letter to Director of the Asia and Oceania Department,” translated from ,חע – Bangkok, 15 Oct. 1979, Israel State Archives,105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 Hebrew by Kobi Fisher.

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66 Yehuda Weissberger, “Letter to Azriel Veldman, the Ministry for Immigrant (Aliya) translated ,חע – Absorption,” 26 Oct. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher. 67 Weissberger, “Letter of Azriel Veldman.” 68 “An American Plane Signaled with Smoke Bombs: Refugee Boat in the Area,” Al HaMishmar, translated from Hebrew ,חע – Sept. 1979, Israel State Archives,105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 16 by Kobi Fisher; Israeli Embassy in Singapore, “Telegram 6917,” 30 Aug. 1979, Israel State .translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher ,חע – Archives,105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 69 Asia and Oceania Department, “Telegram” 4 Sept. 1979, Israel State Archives,105.5, translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Asia and Oceania ,חע – Appendix C, 7248/28 Department, “Telegram 7425,” 14 Sept. 1979, Israel State Archives,105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher. In the second telegram, the Asia and Oceania ,חע – Department notes that a baby on the ZIM Sydney ship died in transit, bringing the number of refugees down to 40. It is unclear whether the final total of refugees absorbed from Singapore was 40 or 41. 70 Yehuda Weissberger, “Letter to Azriel Veldman, the Ministry for Immigrant (Aliya) translated ,חע – Absorption,” 26 Oct. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher. 71 Minister of Absorption Housing and Building, “Letter regarding ‘The Vietnam Refugees— Government Decision (No. 854) of the 1st of July 1979,’” 28 Oct. 1979, Israel State Archives, translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Ministry of ,חע – Appendix C, 7248/28 ,105.5 Immigrant Absorption, Office of the Spokesman, “The Story of the Absorption of the Vietnam refugees 200“ ;חע – Refugees,” 1 Jan. 1980, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 from Vietnam will arrive next week,” Davar, 16 Oct. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; “200 refugees will arrive ,חע – Appendix C, 7248/28 tomorrow in Israel,” Yedioth Ahronoth, 22 Oct. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, .translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher ,חע – 7248/28 72 See, for example, Asia and Oceania Department, “Telegram 197,” 19 Sept. 1979, Israel State translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Israeli ,חע – Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 Embassy in Singapore, “Telegram 134,” 20 Sept. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix ,translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Asia and Oceania Department ,חע – C, 7248/28 ,חע – Telegram 1641,” 21 Sept. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28“ translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Israeli Embassy in Singapore, “Telegram 4964,” 28 translated from Hebrew by ,חע – Sept. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 Kobi Fisher; Asia and Oceania Department, “Telegram 47,” 1 Aug. 1979, Israel State Archives, translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Asia and Oceania ,חע – Appendix C, 7248/28 ,105.5 Department, “Telegram 3410,” 8 Aug. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 .translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher ,חע – 73 Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, Office of the Spokesman, “The Story of the Absorption of .חע – the Vietnam Refugees,” 1 Jan. 1980, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 74 From 1969 to 1973, President Nixon ordered the United States Strategic Air Command (SAC) to conduct a bombing campaign in eastern Cambodia and Laos, codenamed Operation Menu and Operation Freedom Deal. These operations sought to bomb the Ho Chi Minh Trail, used by Vietnamese Communist forces to bring soldiers and resources from North Vietnam to South Vietnam.

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75 Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, Office of the Spokesman, “The Story of the Absorption of .חע – the Vietnam Refugees,” 1 Jan. 1980, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 76 Dan Arkin and Ezra Yaniv, “‘New Refugees’ from Vietnam will learn Hebrew at the Town Sderot before Absorption in Israel,” Ma’ariv, 24 Oct. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, .translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher ,חע – Appendix C, 7248/28 77 Knesset Member Mordechai Vershovsky, “Letter to the Honorable Dr. Yosef Burg, Minister of the Interior,” 25 Dec. 1979, Israel State Archives, “Committee for the Absorption of Refugees .translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher ,גל – from Vietnam,” 9474/19 78 Shabtai Rosenne, Israeli diplomat and Chairman of the Delegation to the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea, explicitly told the Director General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to compare the Southeast Asian refugee crisis to the fate of the Jewish people during the Holocaust in its public communications. See Shabtai Rosenne, “Letter to the Ministry of Foreign translation from ,חע – Affairs,” 5 Jan. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 Hebrew by Kobi Fisher. At least two telegrams—one dated 6 September 1979 and another dated 24 August 1979—stressed the importance of “good publicity.” See Dr. Ovadia Sofer, “Telegram translated from ,חע – Sept. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 6 ”,507 Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Yoel Alon, “Telegram,” 24 Aug. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher. For more examples, Moti ,חע – Appendix C, 7248/28 Levi, “Letter from Bonn, Germany to the Journalism Department regarding Israeli Humanitarian Aid to the Vietnam Refugees,” 31 Oct. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 ,translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Yoel Alon, UN Delegation in New York ,חע – ,חע – Telegram 8635,” 22 June 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28“ translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Ruth Raeli, “Telegram 6286,” 13 Sept. 1979, Israel .translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; M ,חע – State Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 Mendes, “Letter to Mr. A. Efrati, Director of the Department for Communications, and Mr. M. Sasson, Special Ambassador of Journalism and Public Relations, regarding the reception of ,חע – refugees from Vietnam,” 29 Jan. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; David Ben-Dov, “Letter regarding Australia Sun’s coverage of Vietnam Refugees to Israel,” 26 Jan. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix .translation from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Yoel Alon, “Telegram 548,” 24 Jan ,חע – D, 7248/29 translation from Hebrew by Kobi ,חע – Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 ,1979 Fisher; Yaish, “Telegram 79,” Athens, 23 Jan. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, translation from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Dubi, “Handwritten note regarding ,חע – 7248/29 publicity of refugees in Ofakim,” 10 Jan. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, .translation from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher ,חע – 7248/29 79 Micha Shagrir, Kastel Films, “Letter to Yigal Efrati, the Israel Film Service,” 20 Dec. 1978, translation from Hebrew by Kobi ,חע – Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 Fisher. 80 Avi Pazner, “Telegram 98,” 9 Jan. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 – .translation from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher ,חע 81 Mordechai Lador, “Letter regarding Bangkok Post Editorial—Indochina Refugees—The Arab translation ,חע – OPEC States,” 1 Aug. 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, 7248/28 from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher. 82 In a November 1978 letter to Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Zvi Rafiah, New York Congressman Stephen J. Solarz explained that he was driven to help the “15,000 homeless and

135 helpless Cambodian refugees in Thailand” by the “haunting reminder of the European refugees who tried without success to find a refuge in our own country from the horrors of Hitlerism almost forty years ago.” He concluded that “our own government, mindful of its failure to do anything for those who were fleeing the previous European Holocaust, is not determined not to turn its back on the victims of the present Asian Holocaust.” See Stephen J. Solarz, “Letter to In his speech .חע – Zvi Rafiah,” 9 Nov. 1978, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix D, 7248/29 to the House of Representatives in September 1978, Solarz also refers to the Southeast refugee crisis as an “Asian Holocaust.” See “Aiding the Victims of an Asian Holocaust,” Congressional Record Vol. 124, No. 155, Washington DC, 29 Sept. 1978, Israel State Archives, 105.5, In a letter sent to UN member states on 10 July 1979 denouncing the .חע – Appendix D, 7248/29 Vietnamese government’s purging of ethnic Chinese citizens, the Committee Against Genocide by Vietnam, a Chinese American coalition of some thirty organizations, began by invoking the plight of Jewish refugees: “Four decades ago, Nazi Germany collectively exterminated 6 million Jews. While painful memories of suffering Jewish refugees from Hitler’s German Empire are still fresh in the minds of people throughout the world, equally cruel means are being used by the Vietnamese government today to persecute and systematically carry out a modern-day extermination of more than 1 million ethnic Chinese in Vietnam.” See C. T. Huang on behalf of Committee Against Genocide by Vietnam, “Letter to Israel—Permanent Mission to the United In a letter to .חע – Nations,” 10 July 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix B, 7248/27 Begin dated 20 July 1979, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew wrote: “The world is seeing a repeat of the Holocaust in a different form.” Lee Kuan Yew, “Letter to Prime Minister .חע – Menachem Begin,” 20 July 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix B, 7248/27 83 Office of the Vice President’s Press Secretary, “Press Release of Vice President Walter F. Mondale’s speech to the UN Conference on Indochinese Refugees,” 21 July 1979, Israel State .חע – Archives, 105.5, Appendix B, 7248/27 84 “A Refugee Horror Story,” Jerusalem Post, 18 June 1979, reprinted in Jerusalem Post International Edition, No. 973, 24 June 1979, clipping in Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix .חע – B, 7248/27 85 E. Tamir, “Letter regarding Vietnam Refugees—Family Reunions,” 3 June 1980, Israel State translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Letter from ,חע – Archives, 105.5, Appendix E, 7248/30 Manfred Paeffgen, Representative in the Philippines, “Letter to Moshe Raviv, Ref: Eviatar ;חע – HCR/ML/244,” 10 March 1980, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix E, 7248/30 Manor, “Letter regarding Vietnam Refugee,” 13 May 1980, Israel State Archives, 105.5, translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher; Asia and Oceania ,חע – Appendix E, 7248/30 Department, “Telegram 9179, Response to Manor regarding Vietnam Refugee,” 23 May 1980, ;translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher ,חע – Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix E, 7248/30 A. Amit, “Letter regarding Family Voong Venh Chieng—8 souls—from Honk-Kong,” 1 Jan. .translated from Hebrew by Kobi Fisher ,חע – Appendix E, 7248/30 ,1980 86 Anat Ben-Dor and Rami Adut, “Israel—A Safe Haven?: Problems in the Treatment Offered by the State of Israel to Refugees and Asylum Seekers” Report and Position Paper, Buchmann Faculty of Law: The Public Interest Law Resource Center (Tel Aviv University), Physicians for Human Rights, September 2003, 21-23; Sarah Helm, “Bosnian Muslims Find Haven in Israel,” The Independent, 17 Feb. 1993, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/bosnian-muslims- find-haven-in-israel-1473480.html; Fran Markowitz, “Living in Limbo: Bosnian Muslim Refugees in Israel,” Human Organization 55, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 127-132; Karin Fathimath

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Afeef, “A Promised Land for Refugees? Asylum and Migration in Israel,” Research Paper No. 183, Policy Development and Evaluation Service, UNHCR: The UN Refugee Agency (December 2009): 1-25, http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/research/working/4b2213a59/promised-land-refugees- asylum-migration-israel-karin-fatimath-afeef.html. 87 Afeef, “A Promised Land for Refugees?”, 1-25. 88 Ben-Dor and Adut, “Israel—A Safe Haven?”, 24. 89 Batsheva Sobelman, “One Country that Won’t Be Taking Syrian Refugees: Israel,” Los Angeles Times, 6 Sept. 2015, http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-syrian-refugees- israel-20150906-story.html; Green, “Inside Israel’s Secret Program to Get Rid of African Refugees,” foreignpolicy.com. 90 Shoshana Bryen, “Israel and the Boat People,” The Times of Israel (Jerusalem), 6 Jan. 2012, http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/israel-and-the-boat-people. Menucha Chana Levin, “Vietnamese Boat People in the Promised Land: Memories of Holocaust Refugees, but with a Different Ending,” aish.com (Jerusalem), 19 Nov. 2011, http://www.aish.com/jw/id/Vietnamese_Boat_People_in_the_Promised_Land.html. 91 Bryen also provides details of the ships of Holocaust refugees that tried to find refuge in the British Mandate of Palestine: “More than 100,000 Jews tried to reach Palestine by sea between 1934 and 1948 on 120 ships making 142 voyages. Only a few thousand made it to Israel that way. More than 1,600 drowned. More than 1,000 were killed on the SS Struma (768 dead, one survivor) and the Mefkura (345 dead, five survivors), both sunk by Soviet torpedoes. The British interned as many as 50,000 in Cyprus, or back in Germany, including the passengers of the Exodus in 1947. The Hannah Senesh docked; the Enzo Sereni didn’t. The Salvador and the Europa were wrecked in storms.” Shoshana Bryen, “Israel and the boat people,” The Times of Israel (Jerusalem), January 6, 2012, http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/israel-and-the-boat-people. 92 Sarit Catz, “On Refugees and Racism, a Double Standard Against Israel,” CAMERA, July 3, 2012, accessed December 15, 2013, http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=147&x_article=2265. 93 Lisa Goldman, “I remember when Israel rescued non-Jewish refugees,” +972 Magazine, September 6, 2012, accessed December 15, 2013, http://972mag.com/i-remember-when-israel- rescued-non-jewish-refugees/55387/. 94 Hillel Halkin, “A Shame on Israel,” The New York Sun (New York City, NY), 10 July 2007. 95 Halkin, “A Shame on Israel.” 96 Hirsh Goodman, “Losing the Propoganda War,” New York Times, 31 Jan. 2014. 97 Goodman, “Losing the Propoganda War.” 98 For example: The Jewish Virtual Library, “A Project of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise,” has a tab for “Vietnamese Boat People in Israel” under “Immigration to Israel.” See Naomi Scheinerman, “Immigration to Israel: Vietnamese Boat People in Israel,” Jewish Virtual Library, accessed December 15, 2013, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Immigration/VietBoatPeople.html. The American Zionist Movement’s website has a subsection entitled “Vietnam” under a broader series entitled “Truth About Israel: An AZM Educational Campaign.” See “Truth About Israel: Vietnam,” The American Zionist Movement, accessed December 15, 2013, http://www.azm.org/truth-about- israel-vietnam/.

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99 BlueStar, “Which Middle Eastern Country Provided Refuge and Citizenship to 350 Homeless Vietnamese Desperately Seeking Political Asylum?,” accessed December 15, 2013, http://www.flickr.com/photos/wznc/2825835025/in/photostream/. 100 The series Features from Jerusalem, from example, quotes Tran Thuan, an English-speaking spokesman for the second wave of ethnic Chinese Vietnamese refugees, as telling the press “I want to tell all Israelis how grateful I am” shortly before landing at Ben Gurion airport in January 1979, and reporting “People have been very helpful and kind and we’re already beginning to feel very much at home” in a follow-up piece five months later. See “Refugee Viet adopt Israel,” Features from Jerusalem, 6 July 1979, clipping in Israel State Archives, 105.5, In a follow-up story printed in the Associated Press in 1986, nine .חע – Appendix B, 7248/27 years after Begin’s initial absorption in 1977, Jonathan Immanuel likewise reports that “young Vietnamese tend to see themselves as Israelis. Huynh Minh, for example, says his favorite subject in school is the Torah, the five Books of Moses which speak of God’s promise to give the land of Israel to the Jews.” See Jonathan Immanuel, “Today’s Focus: Vietnamese Refugees Adjust to Life in the Jewish State,” The Associated Press (New York City, NY), January 3, 1986. The Israel State Archive also evidences an unpublished handwritten letter (in green ink, in English) from an unnamed refugee in Canberra, Australia, thanking Israel for absorbing For more on .חע – Vietnamese refugees. See Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix A, 7248/26 this theme in the Vietnamese American context, see Mimi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 101 David Levi, Minister of Immigrant Absorption, introduces the booklet by reiterating the special relationship that Israel has to the Vietnamese refugees: “As a country where half of its population is made up of refugees that have been absorbed during its 31 years of statehood, we the People of Israel know the taste of being pursued and to wander—homeless—amongst the peoples of the world. Therefore we were among the first to accept brother refugees from Indo- China.” Presenting the booklet as the “story of the successful integration of two groups of Vietnamese refugees to my country,” Levin calls on “other countries to follow suit and accept similar groups of refugees.” Department of Information for Olim, Office of the Spokesman, “The Absorption of Vietnamese Refugees: The Israel Experience/L’Integration des Refugies Vietnamiens: L’expérience d’Israël,” July 1979, Israel State Archives, 105.5, Appendix C, .חע – 7248/28 102 In the second letter, translated from Hebrew, Long Li Tin Lau, a youth who traveled to Israel with the first wave of refugees ahead of his parents and siblings, recounts his harrowing flight from Vietnam, his rescue by the Israeli ship Yuvali, and his first days in the country: “The people of Ofakim were very kind to us. After a year, we 10 children who had no parents, were told that we will be moved to a youth village where we will live and study together with other Israel kids. They brought us to a beautiful place called Meier Shfeyah Youth Village. They received us with open arms and provided us with everything. We learned Hebrew and other subjects and felt like everyone else.” He concludes by thanking the Government of Israel, the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, Youth Aliyah and the Meier Shfeyah Youth Village from the bottom of his heart “for all the wonderful things that they did and are doing for us.” The third letter was written Tran Thuan, the unofficial spokesman for the second wave of Vietnamese refugees, who details the group’s generous welcome in Afula, receipt of free health care for six months and subsidies for meals, lack of difficulty in finding jobs, and resettlement in more

138 permanent housing, thanks to grants from the Jewish Agency. He concludes by thanking the “kind-hearted and helping friends as we have here in Israel!” 103 The 1986 Associated Press article quoted in the above endnote also provides glimpses of refugee resentment, doubt, and hardship. Dr. Hoa Tran Quang, who by 1986 had found a job as a heart surgeon at Tel Hashomer military hospital near Tel Aviv, reflected, “This society looks Western, but in its depths it is basically religious. Can we really be Israeli without being Jewish?” Daniel Rossing, a Ministry of Religious Affairs official who noted that Judaism does not encourage conversions, claimed that “there is no reason at all why they should feel they have to change their religion in order to be Israelis.” Immigration official Arieh Korat gave a bit more nuanced answer however: Vietnamese Israeli children have citizenship rights, but because they are not Jewish, they are not drafted into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF); the disadvantage of this is that unless Vietnamese Israelis are accepted as volunteers, “the sons and daughters of the Vietnamese refugees could miss out on job opportunities and government benefits restricted to veterans.” (Today, Vietnamese Israelis are drafted into the IDF.) Furthermore, racism and discrimination against the Vietnamese in Israel is common. According to the 1986 article, “scores have left to join relatives in Western Europe and the Americas because they were unable to fully integrate, and only 200 remain.” Furthermore, “[m]ost of those who stayed are scattered throughout the country, and the community is not closely knit.” 104 Interview conducted May 24, 2015 by the author. 105 Simona Weinglass, “35 years on, where are Israel’s Vietnamese refugees?” Times of Israel, 20 Sept. 2015, https://www.timesofisrael.com/35-years-on-where-are-israels-vietnamese- refugees/. 106 Weinglass, “35 years on, where are Israel’s Vietnamese refugees?” 107 Weinglass. 108 Weinglass. 109 Weinglass.

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Part III: Unsettling Resettlements: The Refugee Settler Condition in Guam, Israel-Palestine, and Vietnam

140 Chapter 5: Refugee-Chamorro Encounters: Grappling with the Temporality of Settler Militarism on Guam

Settler militarism on Guam is characterized by distinct permanent/transient temporality. Since the U.S. military’s capture of Guam from Spain in 1898 following the Spanish American War, the U.S. has oscillated between processes of permanent settlement—occupation in the form of militarized home-making—and military transience—the turnover of individual servicemen who move between different bases. Although the structure and institution of settler militarism remains permanent, the military settlers themselves that make up this structure—those who live and work on the bases—are relatively transient, caught up in the global circulation of U.S. military empire. This presents a different dynamic of settler home-making than we see in other instances of settler colonialism, such as on the U.S. mainland or in Israel-Palestine, and thus calls for new tools for theorizing decolonization. Non-military settlers also play a role in upholding settler militarism on Guam. In “Colonial Immigration in Guam,” Leland R. Bettis, Executive Director of the Guam Commission on Self-Determination from 1988-2003, emphasizes the role of civilian immigrants in preventing decolonization: History has shown that colonial powers have often used immigration to distract, confuse, and subvert the issues of decolonization, especially when they wish to remain in control of a territory. Immigrants serve to dilute the strength of the native people in a colonized area. Since most immigrants are either citizens of the colonizing country or attempting to become citizens, their loyalties and support will lean toward the colonizing country. This makes them useful colonial tools. In essence, immigrants are part of the colonizing process. They are colonizers not colonized.1 However, even these immigrants-cum-settlers replicate the peculiar permanent/transient dynamic of settler militarism. Prior to World War II, Guam did not host many non-military personnel, but between the American reoccupation of Guam in 1944 and the lifting of the U.S. Navy’s mandatory security clearance in 1962, Guam became “a place for transient migrants.”2 According to Bettis, “While U.S. military personnel were only assigned temporarily, and non- U.S. citizen laborers were usually transient hires, their ‘turn-over’ rates were offset by newly- arriving military personnel or contract hires.”3 In other words, the transience of individual laborers recruited to rebuild Guam after World War II coincided with the steadily increasing percentage of non-Chamorro settlers on Guam. After 1962, the make-up of Guam’s immigrant population changed but did not abate. While the percentage of white Americans from the mainland dropped, the numbers of immigrants from the Philippines, Korea, and the surrounding Pacific Islands increased rapidly, and like many of the pre-1962 immigrants before them, most “tend to be transient,” using Guam “merely as a stepping stone to secure U.S. citizenship before moving on to the U.S.”4 As individuals leave for the mainland, they are replaced by new waves of immigrants, ever decreasing the percentage of native Chamorros on Guam and making an uncontested decolonization plebiscite more and more untenable.5 As displaced peoples fleeing a war-torn country, Vietnamese refugees are distinct from other immigrants, who although constrained by global economic inequalities, do demonstrate greater agency and control over their transnational mobility. The term “refugee settlers” indexes this distinction. During Operation New Life, Vietnamese refugees also mirrored this permanent/transient dynamic of settler militarism. Their processing on Guam, an unincorporated

141 territory of the U.S., marked both their permanent incorporation into a nation-state founded upon settler colonialism, as well as their transient stay on Guam in particular, which served as a temporary stepping stone for the vast majority of the refugees’ move to the mainland. “Tent City” at Orote Point exemplifies this dynamic of settler militarism. Beginning on 22 May 1975, Tent City became a real settlement, an “unincorporated community [mirroring Guam’s own unincorporated status] complete with its own fire department, police force and its own address (F.P.P. San Francisco 96630).”6 It boasted the characteristics and amenities of a real city: “hotdog vendors, beggars, thieves and daily church services,” “two newspapers, an orphanage, two hospitals and 19 doctors,” “eight dining halls, five movies, 300 showers, 303 bathrooms and a bank that’s open seven days a week,” plus “a beach, a civic stationery, and a squad of Xerox machines spitting out copies of forms, copies of sheets and copies of copies.” And yet the city itself, the settlement, was transitory, just one permutation of the more permanent structure of settler militarism on Guam: “Thirty years ago this rocky plot of red coral dust was an airfield for Japanese Zeros. Thirty months ago it was a drag-strip for off-duty sailors in T-shirts. Thirty days ago the area was an overgrown clump of stubby trees, scrubby brush and snails.” And one month later, on 25 June 1975, the city would shut down in anticipation for the upcoming typhoon season, the majority of refugees already gone on their way to the mainland.7 Today, Chamorros face the construction of a new base to house 2,500 more Marines transferred from Okinawa, as well as the destruction of sacred sites such as Pågat for increased military training.8 According to extensive interviews and participant observation conducted by political geographers Jenna M. Loyd, Emily Mitchell-Eaton, and Alison Mountz, local support for settler militarism is “at times premised upon the memory of the Vietnamese refugee operations” during Operation New Life: internalizing the U.S. military’s rhetoric of colonial expansion, “many of Guam’s public officials have pointed to historical refugee operations on Guam as evidence of the island’s capacity for expanded populations (i.e. refugees, asylum- seekers, or military troops) and military operations.”9 In a recent interview, for example, a former immigration officer on Guam cited the island’s capacity to (temporarily) house the Vietnamese refugees in 1975 as evidence that it could therefore accommodate the (indefinite) influx of 2,500 Marines and their dependents. Conflating the impermanent temporality of Operation New Life with the transitory circulation of individual Marines in a more permanent structure of military-build-up, this former immigration officer collapsed the multiple temporalities and contradictions of settler militarism, arguing that Guam’s humanitarian response to the Vietnamese refugees necessitated an equivalent hospitable welcome of the incoming Marines. The settler militarist rhetoric surrounding Operation New Life, therefore, continues to haunt the present, justifying further militarization of an already occupied territory. This chapter focuses on three representations of Operation New Life and its afterlives. It asks: How was the 1975 moment of Vietnamese refugee passage to Guam remembered by Indigenous Chamorros, Vietnamese refugees, and mixed-race folks—the latter of whom have inherited the historical legacies of both Indigeneity and refugeehood? Given the strength of the settler militarism’s material and rhetorical force on Guam, in order to identify quotidian encounters of potential alliance, one must move away from government archives and official newspapers, instead probing more ephemeral sources. Although intimate and personal, the texts discussed below—a high school student’s newspaper article, a refugee repatriate’s memoir, and a college student’s blog—provide snapshots of how the system of settler militarism structured relationships between differentially racialized populations. Analyzing these snapshots provides a template for tackling the ongoing refugee settler condition on Guam, and theorizing potential

142 connections between Vietnamese American refugees and Indigenous Chamorros across the impasses of settler militarism. A mass movement of cross-racial solidarity has yet to be realized in the social sphere; however, these texts offer resources for identifying how U.S. settler militarism affects both populations, albeit asymmetrically, revealing potential points of solidarity against militarization.

Mistaken for a Refugee: Racialized Encounters at Orote Point On 16 May 1975, Chamorro student Edith Iriate published an article in her school newspaper, “The Banana Leaf,” chronicling her experience visiting “Tent City” at Orote Point with a group of twenty classmates.10 Iriate and her classmates attended George Washington Senior High: the first public high school established to serve the local Chamorro population on Guam, ironically named after a foundational figure of American settler colonial history. Visits like these appear relatively common: in another article in this issue, a classmate reports that three busses full of students—chorus members and the Girls’ Glee Club—went to sing at Asan Annex to entertain the refugees.11 In Iriate’s account, the students, chaperoned by Mr. Lescroat, drove to Orote Point in three pickup trucks and a Volkswagen to attend a concert. The account is notable for its narrative arc of shifting racial projection and identification. Iriate starts by marking her difference from the refugees, expressing shock at the poor living conditions— “‘Wow!’ The johns were just boxes”—and fear at the prospect of being overwhelmed by the “25,000 foreign people.” This fear is heightened when Iriate and several girls get separated from the rest of the group; they catch a ride with “this military dude in a jeep” in order to avoid walking in the hot sun, but Mr. Lescroat forgets to tell the driver “where the concert was going to be held.” When the GI fails to find the concert, he drops the girls off and goes to find Mr. Lescroat himself, leaving the girls behind. Iriate and her friends try to approach several other GIs and ask for directions, but they laugh at the girls and mistake them for Vietnamese refugees. This point of the story marks the first shift in Iriate’s racial identification as a native Chamorro high school student. At the beginning, Iriate is distanced from and even slightly repulsed by the “foreign” refugees. However, in the eyes of the military personnel, she is also racialized as the brown Other; although Indigenous to Guam, she is misread as a foreigner: “We finally flagged down two navy dudes, and we told them our problem again, but they still asked if we were refugees! We couldn’t understand why everyone asked us that. To us it seemed obvious that we weren’t Vietnamese.” Although the race of these individual naval sailors remains unmarked in Iriate’s account, chances are they were white, given that 88.4% of the men who served in Vietnam were white.12 And even if they were not white, their comments reproduce the structural white gaze of the U.S. military as an institution, which racialized native Chamorros and Vietnamese refugees as wards of military jurisdiction. That is, although it is the GIs and navy men who are arguably “more foreign” to Guam than the Indigenous Chamorro students, it is the students who are racialized as not belonging here, in this militarized space of the refugee camp—or rather, as belonging “too much,” given their misrecognition as Vietnamese. Although it seems “obvious” to Iriate and her friends that they are not “Vietnamese,” in the eyes of the military men the two racialized populations are blurred. In this encounter, native Chamorros and Vietnamese refugees are homogenized under the U.S.’s militarized gaze. Both are patronized as subjects of military care: Chamorros as children not yet ready for self-government and the Vietnamese as victims of a bloody civil war. Such racialization works to necessitate and justify continual a settler militarist presence on Guam.

143 Yet this racialization—this homogenization of the native and refugee as the composite brown Other—is not only imposed violently from without. By the end of the story, Iriate starts to identify with the Vietnamese refugees on her own terms. After wandering around base in the dark, “we got close to Gab Gab beach and we heard the band.” Reunited with their classmates, Iriate and her friends celebrate. Although Mr. Lescroat said he had trouble finding them because “the military up there said they wouldn’t even look for us if we didn’t respond to their paging,” the girls quickly shrug off their fear and frustration, subconsciously recognizing the seeming futility in critiquing the military’s actions: “We went to a coke machine and we were all putting quarters in like crazy, because we all needed a drink.” The girls then dance and socialize with the Vietnamese refugees. Iriate is especially smitten by a sixteen-year-old half French, half Vietnamese young man named Nick Tran: “I really got to know him and I was amazed at how much his life was similar to ours.” Communication prompts connection and identification: “He knows how to play tennis, and I don’t, he goes to a French school and learns to speak English, he said that once his professor was asking him something and he answered him with a ‘yeah’ rather than a ‘yes’ and his professor told him don’t try to get the American accent. Weird huh.” What connects Iriate and Tran then is not only their shared racialized difference in relation to the U.S. military personnel, but their shared history of entanglement with American culture. They are both marked by U.S. military intervention in their communities, and this racialization sparks recognition in Iriate, who started her account by describing her apprehension of the faceless mass of “foreign” refugees but ends it by acknowledging their individuality and her desire to get to know them: “[Tran] was so nice, now it’s got me thinking how many more of him are there around out of the 25,000, maybe more!” The penultimate sentence best summarizes the significance of this racialized encounter: “When we were leaving [Tran] asked me to stay, I told him I couldn’t but if he ever gets out of there to check-it-out at GW!!” This sentence marks the residual structural difference between native Chamorros and Vietnamese refugees: the latter is confined to the camp, while the former is free to walk out. In this articulation however the lack of mobility is projected upon Iriate—“he asked me to stay, I told him I couldn’t”—rather than Tran. Indeed, while Tran—whose description betrays his relative class privilege—will have the mobility to leave Guam and remake his life, it is actually Iriate who will “stay” on the militarized island of Guam, and who will continue to be misread and underestimated by U.S. military personnel. It is Iriate, as a native Chamorro student, who will continue to bear the brunt of settler militarism on Guam.

Ship of Fate: Vietnamese Repatriates and the Rhetoric of Return Unlike Indigenous Chamorros like Iriate, who were left to contend with the ongoing occupation of island, Vietnamese refugees who were processed during Operation New Life did not stay long, reflecting the transient/permanent temporality of settler militarism. Most Vietnamese refugees passed on to the continental United States, or resettled in countries such as Canada, France, or Australia. The steady flow of refugees towards the so-called West was interrupted, however, by a vocal group of roughly 2,000 Vietnamese protestors who over the course of six months in 1975 demanded repatriation back to their homeland of Vietnam. These refugees compared the Operation New Life camps to prison campus, arguing that they were being held against their will, and demanding that Governor Bordallo and the U.S. government allow them to return to home. Staging public protests, hunger strikes, and violent riots to pressure the U.S. government to concede to their demands, these repatriates asserted that

144 they had not intended to leave permanently Vietnam: some had been stationed on a military plane or ship that after the Fall of Saigon had been diverted to the Philippines or Guam without their prior knowledge, some had been under the false impression that their stay under U.S. custody would be temporary, and some had simply changed their minds regarding their willingness to resettle abroad. In one of the more extreme accounts, thirteen Vietnamese men alleged that the U.S. military had drugged and kidnapped them.13 These refugees, many of whom were young men, desired repatriation for multiple reasons: some wanted to return to their families left behind in Vietnam, some pledged loyalty to their homeland irrespective of Communist control, and a few even identified with the new Communist government.14 In her nuanced account of the protests, historian Jana K. Lipman chronicles how these Vietnamese repatriates “inverted Americans’ understanding of ‘rescue’ and positioned themselves as the captives and the U.S. military as the captor,” strategically drawing comparisons between their situation and that of American POWs, given the similar conditions of “barbed wire, military security, and indefinite waiting.”15 In this way the repatriates challenged the U.S. military’s humanitarian narrative of rescue—a narrative that in turn has been used to scaffold settler militarism and Indigenous land dispossession on Guam. In October 1975, the U.S. government granted the repatriates the largest South Vietnamese ship that had evacuated to Guam, the Việt Nam Thương Tín, and on 16 October 1975, 1,652 of the repatriates sailed back to the newly-independent Vietnam under the leadership of Trần Đình Trụ, former naval captain of the now-fallen southern Republic of Vietnam (RVN).16 Stressing a “politics of contingency,” Lipman cautions however against reading this reversal of the eastward flow of refugees out of Vietnam to the U.S. as a “triumphant rejection of U.S. imperialism or a romanticized revolutionary victory”: despite the Việt Nam Thương Tín’s efforts to fly the Communist flag and advertise a huge portrait of Hồ Chí Minh, the southern Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) and the northern Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) interpreted the repatriates as part of an “American plan to sabotage Vietnam.” Upon their return, the repatriates were imprisoned in reeducation camps, where they were forced to renounce their Western capitalist sensibilities and perform back-breaking manual labor.17 After thirteen years in these camps, Trụ, the naval captain who piloted the Việt Nam Thương Tín from Guam back to Vietnam, immigrated to the U.S. with his family in 1991 under the Humanitarian Operation (HO) program—a name which again sought to recuperate American imperialism as an act of benevolence by stressing the comparative inhumanity of the Communist government that had imprisoned the repatriates as political prisoners.18 Soon after his arrival in the United States, Trụ began to document his dramatic life story “in stolen hours between working the night shift in a convenience store and helping his children adjust to life in the United States.”19 He initially published 2,000 copies of his 400-page memoir under the title Việt Nam Thương Tín: Con tàu định mệnh, which he donated to the Library of Congress and distributed to bookstores in the Vietnamese diaspora. Almost twenty years later, Lipman stumbled upon the memoir while conducting research at the Library of Congress. With Trụ’s permission, she began translating the memoir from Vietnamese into English with the help of Vietnamese American language instructor Bac Hoai Tran. Ship of Fate, published in 2017 after five years of translational labor, is notable for providing not only a first-person account of the refugee camps on Guam, but also a snapshot of a complex life that exceeds the repatriate experience. In deceptively calm and direct prose, Trụ details his multiple experiences of displacement—displacement, one must note, that was structured by Western intervention into a decolonizing country. Born in 1935 in Ninh Bình

145 Province in northern Vietnam, Trụ joined other Catholic families in moving south in 1954, following the French colonists’ defeat at Điện Biên Phủ and the political division of Vietnam at the 17th parallel. He volunteered for the RVN Navy and after two years of training became a naval officer, traveling at sea for months at a time. On the brink of the Fall of Saigon, Trụ evacuated on a ship bound for Subic Bay in the Philippines with the rest of his crew, initiating the long separation from his family that was left behind in Năm Căn. On 13 May 1975 Trụ landed in Guam, where we was interned at first Orote Point, and then Camp Black Construction Co. and Camp Asan, following Orote Point’s closure in June 1975. Unable to imagine life without his family, Trụ joined the repatriate movement to reunite with his loved ones in Vietnam. After five months on Guam, Trụ sailed back to Vietnam, only to be interned in a reeducation camp until 1988. In 1991, Trụ was uprooted once again: bypassing Guam, he completed a final passage to the U.S. mainland under the tutelage of the U.S. government, this time accompanied by his wife and children. Unlike other diasporic Vietnamese writing that emphasizes life in the country of resettlement, Trụ’s memoir details multiple journeys out of Vietnam that preceded the post-1975 refugee exodus, evidencing pre-1975 settler militarist connections between Asia, Guam, and the U.S. mainland. Following the 1961 escalation of U.S. intervention in Vietnam, U.S. officials began inviting RVN soldiers to train at U.S. military bases in Japan, the Philippines, California, and Guam.20 Trụ’s five-month internment on Guam as a refugee was actually prefigured by two earlier visits to the island, including a five-month stay to service a broken RVN ship—an experience that he later describes as a “beautiful” memory.21 Standing in “Tent City” at Orote Point in May 1975, he recalls how just three years ago he had “gone for many picnics on rest days on this hill, which was covered with trees and located near Gab Gab Beach,” a popular military recreation spot.22 Now the hill was leveled, the military uniform of his fallen country shed. Trụ’s “beautiful” experience of Guam—mediated through his role as a U.S. military ally—belonged to the past. In her introduction to the memoir, Lipman observes that although Trụ does not explicitly use the “language of empire” to describe Guam, his word choice does imply Guam’s “nebulous, almost limbo status” as an unincorporated territory.23 At times Trụ refers to Guam as “American soil,” “free land,” and a “part of the United States,” but at other points describes it as a “lonely small island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, so distant from every continent,” that is “under the control” of the U.S.24 In a passage lamenting his lonliness and isolation in the camps, Trụ compares the status of the refugee repatraites with the status of Guam itself: “In some ways, Guam’s isolation reminded me of my own separation from my loved ones. For these six months, I had lived like a parasite, day in and day out, stretching out my hand to receive food like a beggar. My life had no meaning whatsoever.”25 Reading against the grain, extending the comparison articulated in the first sentence of this quote to the following two lines, the memoir evidences, in this moment of slippage, a radical critique of Guam’s territorial status: as long as Guam remains a “parasite” dependent on the U.S. federal government for recognition, “life”— that is, political life, or self-determination—would have “no meaning whatsoever.” Although Trụ depended on the U.S. military for food and shelter during Operation New Life, and during the war had collaborated with the U.S. as an RVN naval officer, he did not unilaterally praise the Americans, rather referring to them at one point as “imperialists.”26 Ship of Fate is notable for articulating an anti-Communist critique of American imperialism, distinct from both the Communist critique outlined in the previous chapter as well as the anti-Communist rhetoric of gratitude often performed by resettled refugees.27 Trụ observes: “Americans always

146 placed the interests of their country above all else, and so small and weak countries were only pawns in a larger game. America had taken part in the war in Vietnam for years, but not only did it not win the war in that country, it had also abandoned it. To the United States, the war had been a game.”28 Identifying foremost as a Vietnamese nationalist, Trụ faulted the U.S. on two fronts: for taking advantage of a weaker nation, and for abandoning a partner in need. As part of the repatriate movement, Trụ also repudiated the paternalism of the refugee camps and critiqued the U.S. military for detaining the repatriates against their will: although the camp had “plenty of activities, and all our basic needs were met,” it was was still “surrounded by barbed wire and had a gate. On the one hand, the base could be seen as an apartment complex, but on the other hand, it could also be seen as a detention camp. It was all the same.”29 This last insight—“It was all the same”—highlights the confluence of humanitarianism and imprisonment that defined Operation New Life, exemplifying the paradoxical rhetoric of imperial benevolence. But a critique of U.S. militarism does not automatically translate into a critique of settler militarism—that is, a recognition of the settler colonial aspect of U.S. militarism, and how it dispossesses the native population. Like Shawn Wong’s Homebase, discussed in chapter one, Ship of Fate is striking in its absence of any mention the Chamorro population, let alone their fight for self-determination via the contemporaneous Commonwealth movement, detailed in chapter two. Trụ does identify the distinct role of the Guamanians writ large in “Guam’s ongoing hospitality,” quoting at one point Governor Bordallo, who in response to the repatriates’ riots had sympathized: “‘We have been trying our best to create a comfortable life for you on the island of Guam. Even though you have organized many protests and created instability on the island, we have tried to help.’”30 He also acknowledges the presence of the “local people,” “30 percent of whom were Americans.”31 However, Trụ assumes that these locals were shocked by repatriates’ sometimes violent protests because “the people here lived in peace and had never experienced anything that upset their lives.”32 Such a comment erases the significant role that Guamanians—both settlers and Chamorros—played during the Vietnam War, as both military personnel who had fought and died in Vietnam and as civilians who had lived amidst B-52s, bombs, and Agent Orange traveling from Guam to Southeast Asia. Furthermore, by conflating the settler and Indigenous populations, this remark renders invisible the longer history of settler militarist violence against native Chamorros in particular: of farmland destruction, rampant militarization, and ongoing land appropriation on Guam. This story of Vietnamese repatriation—one refracted through an entanglement with U.S. settler militarism—does not account for the context of native Chamorro dispossession. Trụ and Vietnamese repatriates did not remain on Guam, and in this sense cannot be considered “settlers” in the conventional understanding of settler colonialism.33 However, this does not alleviate their participation in settler militarism: a particular manifestation of settler colonialism that identifies the primacy of the U.S. military as the colonial force. Although Trụ’s stay on Guam was temporary, the U.S. military institution that interned him is relatively permanent (as of yet). As noted above, the humanitarian rhetoric surrounding Operation New Life justified U.S. military presence on Guam, ossifying settler militarism’s hold on the island. Physically removing oneself from native land then does not necessarily undermine settler militarism: first, Ship of Fate is starkly—though unsurprisingly—silent on the matter of Chamorros’ distinct struggle for decolonization, reproducing the erasure of Indigenous presence from the history of Operation New Life and overwriting the problem of settler militarism on Guam. Second, although Trụ and the repatriates returned to their homeland, Vietnam would become a settler colonial nation in its own right, discriminating against Indigenous peoples in the

147 region.34 Challenging settler militarism necessitates something more: moments of mutual recognition between native Chamorros and Vietnamese refugees, encounters pregnant with the potential for cross-racial solidarity.

Vietnamese Refugee Settlers: A “Decolonization Conversation” Most of the 112,000 Vietnamese refugees processed on Guam continued on to the U.S. mainland and other countries of asylum, or were repatriated back to Vietnam. They disentangled themselves from the responsibility of addressing settler militarism on Guam, moving on to different spaces where they attempted to remake their lives. However, an estimated 4,000 refugees decided to stay and work on the island, contributing the fishing, agriculture, banking, cosmetics, engineering and airline industries, among other skilled professions.35 Father David I. Quitugua, director of the Catholic Diocesan Resettlement Office in Tamuning, headed a federal funded program administered by Guam’s Catholic Social Service to offer the refugees job training, spiritual support, community, and a safety net in case of interrupted sponsorship.36 On one hand, these refugees who settled on Guam became “settlers” in the sense that their presence is predicated on, and more often than not upholds, U.S. military occupation of the island. On the other hand, this settlement—this processing of home-making on the territory of Guam—keeps Vietnamese refugees accountable to the enduring structure of settler militarism. Their refusal to relegate Guam to a transient location, a mere stepping stone in the pursuit of the American Dream and all the privileges of U.S. citizenship, also critiques the hegemonic narrative of the continental U.S.’s supremacy. A residual trace of Operation New Life, they are a living reminder of the military’s control over Guam.37 Some of the refugees who chose to stay on Guam were married to U.S. servicemen stationed on Guam or sponsored by other Guamanian relatives; dozens of Vietnamese orphans were adopted by island families. Other refugees cited an interest in Guam’s tropical climate, proximity to Vietnam, and welcoming culture as reasons for staying.38 One resettled refugee, Kien, praised the “community of good feeling” on Guam. 39 Another, Gia, summarized: “I love Guam. Here the people are very open. They’re friendly. The climate is like Saigon. It is just like home.”40 Many of this initial group of refugee settlers eventually left Guam in search of better opportunities, and only several hundred Vietnamese Americans remain on Guam today. As refugees-turned-citizens-cum-settlers, most of these remaining refugee settlers are invested in maintaining Guam’s territorial status. Their citizenship rights are predicated upon Guam’s inclusion in the U.S. sphere of influence, if only as an unincorporated territory with limited rights to self-government. Given the opportunity, some Vietnamese Americans would perhaps vote for statehood, though others cite Guam’s unincorporated status as beneficial to their small business ventures, given the lower tax rates and decreased regulation. As of yet, most Vietnamese Americans do not actively advocate Guam’s political independence.41 Similar to Hawai’i, Guam manifests “a more liberal multicultural form of settler colonialism,” which celebrates Guam’s ethnic diversity and island hospitality at the expense of Chamorro decolonization efforts aimed at curtailing U.S. military jurisdiction.42 Because Vietnamese Americans have few incentives to give up the privileges of U.S. citizenship in exchange for an uncertain political and economic status under Chamorro self-rule, they implicitly work to uphold settler militarism on Guam, whether consciously so or not. Such “colliding histories” help to explain the difficulty of expressing solidarity between native Chamorro decolonization activists and Vietnamese refugees-turned-American citizens.43

148 Although they praise the friendly hospitality of their Chamorro friends and neighbors, none of the Vietnamese Americans I met on Guam articulated an interest or investment in the U.S. territory’s decolonization. Political participation revolved instead around helping newly arrived Vietnamese immigrants to navigate Guam’s legal system. There are hints of what a yet-to-be- realized articulation of solidarity between Vietnamese Americans and Chamorro decolonization activists could look like, however. By identifying divergent histories linked by U.S. military intervention, “The Decolonization Conversation,” a blog created in 2008 by “Bianca,” a mixed Chamorro-and-Vietnamese student at the University of Guam (UOG), offers one such model. In Fall 2008, Bianca and her mother attended the 2nd Chamorro Summit at the University of Guam, a convention that sought to educate the Chamorro populace of their different political options regarding decolonization.44 In 1997 the Guam Legislature had established a Commission of Decolonization for the Implementation and Exercise of Chamorro Self-Determination. They scheduled a plebiscite for 2000, endorsed by the United Nations, that would proceed with or without U.S. Congressional authorization. Chamorros would vote for either independence, free association, or statehood for Guam. (Commonwealth was notably dropped during this period as an insufficient “interim” status.) Notably, this 1997 law restricted the “self” of “self- determination” to Indigenous Chamorros, instituting a companion Chamorro Registry to register eligible voters as well as to record “the progress and identity of the Chamorro people” for “historical, ethnological, and genealogical purposes” more broadly.45 The Chamorro Registry legislation defined Chamorro people as all inhabitants of the Island of Guam on April 11, 1899, including those temporarily absent from the island on that date and who were Spanish subjects [under Spanish control] who after that date continued to reside in Guam or another territory over which the United States exercises sovereignty and have taken no affirmative steps to preserve or acquire foreign nationality; all persons born in the island of Guam, who resided in Guam on April 11, 1899, including those temporarily absent from the island on that date who after that date continued to reside in Guam or other territory over which the United States exercises sovereignty and have taken no affirmative steps to preserve or acquire foreign nationality; and their descendants.46 Although this legislation refrained from articulating a race-based definition, the plebiscite was still critiqued by detractors as a “Chamorro-only vote” that violated the American principle of democracy. In order to address these criticisms, Guam’s Legislature passed Public Law 25-106 in March 2000, creating a Guam Decolonization Registry (GDR) to replace the Chamorro Registry’s role in recording eligible plebiscite voters. Unlike the Chamorro Registry—a “registry of names of those Chamorro individuals and their descendants who have survived over three hundred years of colonial occupation and continue to develop as one”—the GDR was more narrowly “an index of names established by the Guam Election Commission for the purposes of registering and recording the names of the native inhabitants of Guam eligible to vote in an election or plebiscite for self-determination.”47 The law defined “native inhabitants” as “those persons who became US citizens by virtue of the authority and enactment of the 1950 Organic Act of Guam and descendants of those persons,” thus changing the date of legal nativity from 1898 to 1950.48 In response to critiques of the Chamorro Registry, Public Law 25-106 insisted that the “political status plebiscite shall not be race-based, but based on a clearly defined political class of people resulting from historical acts of political entities in relation to the people of Guam”; what united eligible plebiscite voters then was not necessarily a shared racial category,

149 but the political condition of being forcefully interpellated as American citizens of an unincorporated territory following the Organic Act of 1950. In order to ensure a representative mandate, the law also specified that seventy percent of the island’s eligible voters must be registered on the GDR before a political status plebiscite could occur.49 By 2007, Guam still had not held a decolonization plebiscite. Due to underfunding, lackluster support from Guam’s leaders, and confusion regarding the overlap between the Chamorro Registry and the Guam Decolonization Registry, the GDR had yet to accumulate the requisite seventy percent of eligible voters. As a result, the UN again included Guam in its “Report of the Special Committee on the Situation with regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.”50 Citing General Assembly Resolution 1514, the report reaffirmed that “in the process of decolonization, there is no alternative to the principle of self-determination, which is also a fundamental human right”; and that “it is ultimately for the peoples of the Territories themselves to determine freely their future political status” after educating the populace about their “legitimate political status options”: immersion with the administrating power (in this case U.S. statehood), free- association, or independence.51 In regards to Guam specifically, the report noted Chamorros’ concerns regarding the “impacts of the impending transfer of additional military personnel” from Okinawa to Guam and requested that the U.S. continue to “transfer land to the original landowners of the Territory” and “recognize and respect the political rights and the cultural and ethnic identity of the Chamorro people of Guam.”52 At the summit, Bianca and her mother listened to a debate between Trini Torres and Joe Garrido, representatives for the Independence and Free-Association options respectively, and spoke to different decolonization activists. Bianca left the summit uncertain as to which option presented a “realistic plan of action for the protection and preservation of the Chamorro culture and the people residing on the island,” so she decided to start a blog entitled “The Decolonization Conversation: A Journey through the Events, the Opinions, and the Decisions in Regards to a Burning Question Left Unanswered.”53 Although it has only four posts spanning from 25 October 2008 to 24 May 2009 and does not appear to have generated any comments, the blog is significant for representing a mixed-race perspective on the question of decolonization: one that grapples with the multiple histories and inheritances of both Indigenous and refugee populations. Bianca—who describes herself as “1. A college student exploring the issues that will impact and shape her tomorrow. 2. A freelance writer. Hire her if you dare. 3. A Business Administration major, who has a soft spot for history”—never explicitly identifies her ethnicity or last name. However, her attendance of the 2nd Chamorro Summit suggests her Chamorro blood, while an annoyed aside expressed in a later post suggests her Vietnamese heritage: [Professor at UOG] asked me if I had a Vietnamese restaurant (it's a common question, and for all of you out there, no I don't own a restaurant, or know anyone so well to get you a discount...but in my opinion, the best Vietnamese lumpia is sold at Hoa Mai's in Harmon, across the Micronesia Mall...just that they add a little MSG).54 Bianca’s annoyance, represented by the use of italics, suggests the frequency that she endures such assumptions about her identity. Although there is a large Asian presence on Guam— primarily Filipino immigrants and Japanese business owners and tourists—the Vietnamese American community is relatively small, numbering only several hundred.55 Community members consist of those who have lived on Guam since 1975 plus their families; those who passed through Operation New Life on their way to the mainland, only to return to Guam several

150 decades later for business purposes; Vietnam War refugees who did not pass through Guam but who ended up on the island years later; and recent waves of young people directly from Vietnam who came to work in Vietnamese American-owned nail salons and beauty parlors. Although the Vietnamese community on Guam is small, it is relatively visible and connected, given the prominence of Vietnamese restaurants scattered across the island, serving island-adopted dishes such as “lumpia”: the Filipino name for traditional Vietnamese dishes, gỏi cuốn (spring rolls) and chả giò (fried rolls). Here Bianca expresses her exasperation at being stereotyped as a restaurant owner, and by extension, being read one-dimensionally as Vietnamese foreigner rather than as a mixed-race Chamorro native.56 Such attempts to misread or deny her Chamorro heritage are part of a longer history of Indigenous elimination via miscegenation and the “absorption” of the children of such unions “into the settler category” in the Australian and American contexts.57 A reader might attribute Bianca’s urgent interest in decolonization events—such as a rally at Skinner’s Plaza entitled “Reclaim Guahan: Chule Tatte Guahan” and an event hosted by the Guam Humanities Council entitled “8000: How Will it Change Our Lives?: Community Conversations on the US Military Buildup on Guam”—solely to her Chamorro identity. However, I want to emphasize the significance of her Vietnamese heritage as well, given her apparently frequent misrecognition as a stereotypical Vietnamese restaurant owner. That is, what if this blogger Bianca is invested in questions of self-determination in the face of military buildup not despite her Vietnamese refugee heritage, but because of it? Given her inherited history of U.S. settler militarism on Guam, as well as U.S. military imperialism in Vietnam, Bianca is doubly-positioned to critique the proposed military buildup, which calls into mind our colonial status; did anyone ask the People of Guam first “would you like a couple of Marines in a couple of years?” Was there a poll to see whether we wanted it or not? No one asked, but gave an order, and they are coming whether we like it or not.58 Indexing Chamorro’s complex entanglement with the U.S. military, Bianca quickly retorts that she is “not anti-military or what have you,” but that she’s “just been kicking back and observing this for awhile”—“this” being Guam’s “colonial status” as an unincorporated territory, which doesn’t afford its residents the same rights or privileges as the those residing on the mainland. Bianca recounts an experience trying to sign up for more information on an American online school’s website, facing “restricted access because I wasn’t living in some stateside land,” and emailing the webmaster to kindly explain that “Guam was a U.S. Territory and that I would like to view more information.” However, the webmaster responds: “‘We don’t cater to international institutions.’” Bianca ends the post—the last of her blog—with this insight: Ahh. International. So, we’re a part of this thing, but not really. So I guess Guam’s kind of like the new kid in school; he’s sort of part of the school (transcript-wise), but socially he isn’t. So what do we do about it?59 Bianca’s words characterize not only Guam’s seemingly paradoxical status as an unincorporated territory of the U.S.—“a part of this thing, but not really”—but also Vietnamese refugees’ status as recent American citizens living on Guam—“sort of part” of the group, but “socially” not. “Group” here can refer both to the United States—although American citizens, Vietnamese Americans on Guam face the same political restrictions as other Guamanians—as well as more specifically to Guam—although Guamanian, they are not Indigenous and thus not typically included in decolonization conversations.

151 What roles can Vietnamese refugees-turned-American citizens, shaped by a history of U.S. war-turned-rescue operation, play in native Chamorro decolonization efforts? Given their rhetorical appropriation by the U.S. military during Operation New Life, Vietnamese refugees inadvertently embody “the power to represent or enact” settler militarism on Guam, retroactively humanizing and justifying U.S. military occupation of Indigenous land.60 As settlers who stayed on Guam, they contribute to the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples. However, Vietnamese refugees’ distinct yet interconnected experiences of U.S. military imperialism also present potential points of solidarity with Chamorro decolonization struggles resistant to U.S. militarism. U.S. intervention into Vietnam was predicated upon the colonization of Guam; the decolonization of Guam could therefore inhibit future U.S. military forays into the Asian Pacific. Furthermore, on a small island with high rates of interracial marriage, subject positions and personal histories become increasingly messy and entangled, making it difficult to discuss “distinct” experiences of U.S. settler militarism. For individuals like Bianca, caught between competing family histories of Indigeneity and refugee displacement, subjectivity is hybrid and liminal—a reflection of Guam’s own liminal, unincorporated status.61 In Bianca’s words: “So what do we do about it?” Vietnamese refugees, Chamorro natives, and those caught in the mix must engage in a “Decolonization Conversation” in order to become “multilingual in each other’s histories”—the only way to resist and critique the differential racialization processes enacted by U.S. settler militarism on Guam.62 Today, Guam remains in a liminal political status, neither fully independent nor fully integrated into the imperial United States. In March 2012, Arnold “Dave” Davis—a white, non- Chamorro, long-time resident of Guam and retired officer in the U.S. Air Force—filed a lawsuit against the GDR for discriminating against non-Chamorro U.S. citizens. In March 2017, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Frances Tydingco-Gatewood ruled in favor of Davis, striking down Guam’s plebiscite law for violating the Fifteenth Amendment.63 Note here the role of the U.S. military—Davis as synecdoche—in continually undermining Chamorro self-determination efforts. In defiance, Guam’s current governor, Eddie Calvo, has vowed to fight the decision in an appeals court, promising that the plebiscite to determine Guam’s political status will proceed. Time shall tell how Vietnamese American refugee settlers respond. Effective decolonization must attend to the distinct temporality of settler militarism: the confluence of structural permanence and individual transience. Rather than reproduce ahistorical settler-native binaries, is important to note that the permanence of Chamorros on Guam as taotao tano, people of the land, does not preclude their individual mobility and movement. Chamorros were originally diasporic wayfarers from Southeast Asia who settled upon Guam nearly 4,000 years ago; today Chamorros in the diaspora outnumber their kin on Guam.64 Despite contemporary attempts to legally define who is Chamorro using temporal markers (residence on the island in 1898 or 1950), Chamorros’ Indigenous right to Guåhan should not be premised upon a sense of linear temporal primacy, a rhetoric of “Who was here first?” Such rhetoric reproduces the exclusionary logic of nation-states, which depend upon a naturalized, mythic relationship between one people and one land. Rather, Chamorros’ right to decolonization and self-determination is based upon historical processes of colonization and unlawful land dispossession—processes cemented by the structure of settler militarism. Furthermore, contrary to the fears of Guamanians like Davis, decolonization, understood as Indigenous resurgence, does not discriminate against non-Chamorros based on race. As explained by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg storyteller, scholar, activist and member of Alderville First Nation, “Indigenous resurgence, in its most radical form,

152 is nation building, not nation-state building,” that works by “centering, amplifying, animating, and actualizing the processes of grounded normativity as flight paths or fugitive escapes from the violences of settler colonialism.”65 Unlike nation-state building, nation building is not a project of racialized inclusion and exclusion, but rather one of what Dene scholar Glen Sean Coulthard calls “grounded normativity”: an “ethical framework” of “Indigenous struggles against capitalist imperialism” that are “not only for land, but also deeply informed by what the land as a mode of reciprocal relationship (which is itself informed by place-based practices and associated form[s] of knowledge) ought to teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitative way.”66 Mixed-race folks like Bianca, Vietnamese American allies, and even Guamanians like Davis can participate in such nation building projects, regardless of race, as long as they respect native Chamorro place-based practices and concede military control over the land. Contrary to the logic of settler militarism, grounded normativity is defined by Indigenous epistemologies of non-denomination. Although Vietnamese refugee settlers are implicated in settler militarism, as Bianca’s blog evidences, there exist potential points of solidarity. Invoking Chamorros’ diasporic movement, both from Southeast Asia 4,000 years ago as well as to the U.S. mainland today, also invites connections with the diasporic condition of Vietnamese refugees: their lasting connectivity with other spaces and peoples around the globe that disrupts a particular settler sensibility of naturalized permanence and colonial ownership of the land. Without naively over- glorifying the liberatory potential of diaspora, I do want to suggest that it offers a model of home-making that need not uphold the structures of settler militarism. By remembering their own history of displacement, Vietnamese refugees who settle on Guam can remain critical of Indigenous displacement, recognizing their potential investment in decolonization struggles and creating a home rather than, to invoke Shawn Wong, a homebase.67 Conversely, perhaps there is a way that Chamorro decolonization activists can activate the transitory underpinnings of settler militarism, to counter its seeming permanence on Guam. Perhaps there is a way that they can seize Guam’s future, demilitarizing this space called home.

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1 Leland Bettis, “Colonial Immigration in Guam,” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 111. 2 Bettis, 108. 3 Bettis, 108. 4 Bettis, 117. 5 This immigrant transience also has economic implications: Permanent residents on Guam are “excepted to absorb the costs of providing for [the immigrants’] needs, even though many are transient and will eventually move on. Providing an education system for a great diversity of students obviously is expensive. Yet, the permanent residents of Guam are expected to pay the extra costs, not only for their own students but also for those who will probably never return as productive or contributing members of the community. Since many immigrants to Guam later leave, what will be the return on investments for Guam’s permanent residents.” Bettis, 113. 6 Andrew H. Malcolm, “Tent City Life Goes On,” Honolulu Star Bulletin, 22 May 1975. 7 Another example: in 1976, a year after Camp Asan’s closure, the site was used to host the annual Liberation Day celebrations on July 21. It “might have been chosen because of its symbolism of the American ideal of freedom,” or because “it was the best site available, given the fact that the island had been severely ravaged by Supertyphoon Pamela just two months prior.” Cecilia C. T. Perez, “A Chamorro Re-Telling of ‘Liberation,’” in Kinalamten Pulitikåt: Siñenten I Chamorro, Issues in Guam’s Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective (Agaña: Political Status and Education Coordinating Commission, 1996), 72. 8 In 2006, the U.S. military initially proposed the transfer of 8,000 Marines and 9,000 dependents to Guam. The plans also included “the removal of 71 acres of coral reef from Apra Harbor to allow the entry and berthing of nuclear aircraft carriers, the acquisition of land including the oldest and revered Chamorro village on the island at Pagat for a live-fire training range, and an estimated 47 percent increase in the island’s population, already past its water-supply carrying capacity.” - Lutz, “US Military Bases on Guam in a Global Perspective.” However, protests on Guam have successfully decreased this number to 2,500 and slowed the process of transfer. See also Tiara R. Na’puti and Michael Lujan Bevacqua, “Militarization and Resistance from Guåhan: Protecting and Defending Pågat,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (September 2015): 837–58. 9 Jenna M. Loyd, Emily Mitchell-Eaton, and Alison Mountz, “The Militarization of Islands and Migration: Tracing Human Mobility through US Bases in the Caribbean and the Pacific,” Political Geography 52 (2016): 70. 10 Edith Iriate, “Concert for Orote Point Refugees,” The Banana Leaf, 16 May 1975, 8-9. Although Iriate does not reveal her ethnicity in this article, it is safe to assume that she is at least partly Chamorro. First, George Washington Senior High has a predominantly Chamorro population. Second, “Iriate” is either a misspelling or deliberate variation on the name “Iriarte,” which although not a native word, is a common last name of Chamorro families on the island today. 11 Robyn Walls, “Chorus Sings at Asan,” The Banana Leaf, 16 May 1975, 1. 12 “Vietnam War Statistics,” http://history-world.org/vietnam_war_statistics.htm. This source cites the VFW Magazine and the Public Information Office, HQ CP Forward Observer -1st Recon, 12 April 1997.

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13 Jana K. Lipman, “‘Give Us a Ship’: The Vietnamese Repatriate Movement on Guam, 1975,” American Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2012): 10. 14 Lipman, 9. 15 Lipman, 15. 16 Trần Đình Trụ, Ship of Fate: Memoir of a Vietnamese Repatriate, trans. Bac Hoai Tran and Jana K. Lipman (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017), 137–39. The other 500 or so repatriates decided at the last minute to continue on to the U.S. 17 Lipman, “‘Give Us a Ship’: The Vietnamese Repatriate Movement on Guam, 1975,” 2, 4; Trụ, Ship of Fate, 112, 95; For more on reeducations camps, see “Chapter 14: Reeducation Camps,” in Trụ, 165–81; For a fictionalized account of the reeducation camps, see Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer (New York: Grove Press, 2016). 18 The HO program facilitated the immigration of former reeducation camp prisoners from Vietnam directly to the United States. 19 Jana K. Lipman, “Introduction,” in Ship of Fate: Memoir of a Vietnamese Repatriate (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017), 3. 20 Trụ, Ship of Fate, 38–47. 21 Trụ, 46, 54, 123. 22 Trụ, 58. 23 Lipman, “Introduction,” 3. 24 Trụ, Ship of Fate, 110, 69, 206, 153, 137, 171, emphasis added. 25 Trụ, 137. 26 Trụ, 200. 27 For an analysis of the latter, see for example Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 28 Trụ, Ship of Fate, 57–58. 29 Trụ, 90–91. 30 Trụ, 110. 31 Trụ, 74. 32 Trụ, 74. 33 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409. 34 See for example Thu-hương Nguyễn-võ, “Articulated Sorrows: Intercolonial Imaginings and the National Singular,” Canadian Review of American Studies, forthcoming in 2018. 35 Ronn Ronck, “Evacuee-Employe [sic] Hunt is On,” Pacific Daily News, 23 May 1975, 1, 3; Dave Hendrick, “Firms Sponsor Most Cleared Refugees,” Pacific Daily News, 28 May 1975, 4; Susan Guffey, “Refugee ‘At Home’ on Guam,” Pacific Daily News, 29 May 1975, 3; Susan Guffey, “Refugees Begin Job Searches,” Pacific Daily News, 7 June 1975, 3; “Well Done,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 8 July 1975, A-16; Martha Ruth, “Refugees Want to Stay and Fish around Guam,” Pacific Daily News, 12 July 1975, 20; Gloria Lujan, “Seven Refugees Daily Released on Island,” Pacific Daily News, 21 July 1975, 4-5; Gloria Lujan, “Vietnamese Refugees Growing Into Guam’s Culture,” Pacific Daily News, 13 August 1975, 22. 36 Pedro C. Sanchez, Guahan/Guam: The History of Our Island (Agana, Guam: Sanchez Publishing House, 1991), 380.; Author’s interview with David I. Quitugua on 7 June 2016 in Guam; Lujan, “Seven Refugees Daily Released on Island,” 4-5. 37 Special thanks to Rachel Haejin Lim for help with these insights.

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38 This is based on interviews I conducted with Vietnamese Americans on Guam in May 2016. 39 Lujan, “Vietnamese Refugees Growing Into Guam’s Culture,” 22. 40 Quoted in Lujan, 22. 41 This is based on interviews I conducted with Vietnamese Americans on Guam in May 2016. 42 Dean Itsuji Saranillio, “Colliding Histories: Hawai’i Statehood at the Intersections of Asians ‘Ineligible to Citizenship’ and Hawaiians ‘Unfit for Self-Government’’,’” Journal of Asian American Studies 13, no. 3 (October 2010): 287. 43 Saranillio, 287. 44 Beau Hodai, “Chamorro Summit Draws Good Crowd Among Youth,” Peace and Justice for Guam and the Pacific, 27 Oct. 2008, accessed 17 July 2017, http://decolonizeguam.blogspot.com/2008/10/chamorro-summit-draws-good-crowd-among.html. 45 For more on the Guam Legislature’s “Act to Create the Commission on Decolonization,” see Public Law 23-147; for more on the Chamorro Registry, see Public Law 23-130. Both were passed on 30 September 1997. 46 Public Law 23-130. Quoted in Victoria-Lola Leon Guerrero, “Chamorro Registry and the Decolonization Registry,” Guampedia, http://www.guampedia.com/chamorro-registry-and-the- decolonization-registry/, accessed 26 June 2017. 47 Public Law 23-130, Public Law 25-106. 48 Public Law 25-106. 49 Public Law 25-106. 50 General Assembly Official Records, Sixty-second Session, Supplement No. 23 (A/62/23). 51 “Report of the Special Committee on the Situation with regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,” 68. 52 “Report of the Special Committee,” 73-74. 53 Bianca, “Initiating the Conversation,” The Decolonization Conversation, October 25 2008, http://decolonizationconversation.blogspot.com/. 54 Bianca, “Reclaiming GUAHAN,” The Decolonization Conversation, 23 May 2009, http://decolonizationconversation.blogspot.com/. Emphasis in original. I’ve redacted the name of the professor for privacy purposes, since this individual still works at UOG and has many prominent Chamorro and Filipino relatives. 55 Vietnamese Americans are not disaggregated on Guam’s census. However, most people I spoke to in 2016 estimated that several hundred people of Vietnamese descent lived on Guam. 56 I was directed to this blog by UOG Assistant Professor and decolonization activist Michael Lujan Bevacqua, who had taught Bianca and also referred to her as “Vietnamese student.” 57 Patrick Wolfe, “Nation and MiscegeNation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-Mabo Era,” Social Analysis 36 (October 1994): 101. 58 Bianca, “8,000: How Will It Change Our Lives?”, The Decolonization Conversation, 24 May 2009, http://decolonizationconversation.blogspot.com/. 59 Bianca. 60 Dean Itsuji Saranillio, “Why Asian Settler Colonialism Matters: A Thought Piece on Critiques, Debates, and Indigenous Difference,” Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3–4 (2013): 283. 61 I thank Antoinette Charfauros McDaniel and Kristin Oberiano for these insights. 62 Saranillio, “Colliding Histories,” 304. 63 “The U.S. Constitution does not permit for the government to exclude otherwise qualified voters in participating in an election, where public issues are decided simply because those

156 otherwise qualified voters do not have the correct ancestry or bloodline,” the judge said. “Having found that the classification is racial, this court finds that the plebiscite statute impermissibly imposes race-based restrictions on the voting rights of non-native inhabitants of Guam, in violation of the 15th Amendment.” Quoted in Gaynor D. Daleno, “‘Race-based’ Plebiscite Struck Down,” The Guam Daily Post, 9 March 2017. See also Jasmine Stole and Jerick Sablan, “Judge: Plebiscite Law Unconstitutional; AG May Appeal,” Pacific Daily News, 9 March 2017. 64 Craig Santos Perez, Off-Island Chamorros (Crosscurrent, 2017), https://craigsantosperez.bandcamp.com/track/off-island-chamorros. 65 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Indigenous Resurgence and Co-Resistance,” Critical Ethnic Studies 2, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 22. 66 Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 60. 67 Shawn Wong, Homebase (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008).

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Chapter 6: The Politics of Translation: Diasporic Rhetorics of Return in Israel-Palestine and Vietnam

Vaan Nguyen is arguably the most high profile Vietnamese Israeli. Born in Ashkelon in 1982, Nguyen is the daughter of Vietnamese refugees who came to Israel in 1979 as part of the third wave of refugee absorption. In 2005, she starred in Duki Dror’s film, The Journey of Vaan Nguyen, and in 2008, she published a collection of poetry, The Truffle Eye. Most recently, Guerrilla Culture”), an activist collective“ ,גרילה תרבות) ”Nguyen participated in “Gerila Tarbut founded in 2007 by Mati Shemoelof that promotes social and political causes, such as the end of Israeli occupation, through poetry and music.1 Vaan’s name is marked by the residue of translation. Reflecting Trinh T. Minh-ha’s insight that “[t]ranslation seeks faithfulness and accuracy and always ends up betraying either the letter of the text, its spirit, or its aesthetics,” “Vaan” is accented by its passage—translation, transference—through Vietnamese, into Hebrew, into English.2 “Vân,” meaning “cloud” in in Hebrew, which is transliterated into “Vaan” in ”ואן“ Vietnamese, becomes the homophonic English—the doubling of the vowel “a” a characteristic foreign to both Hebrew and Vietnamese. Thus, “Vaan” is arguably a diasporic name, one made possible by multiple translations across language, space, and culture. This chapter utilizes the analytic of translation in order to grapple with representations of Vietnamese refugees in the State of Israel: the first non-Jewish, non-Palestinian group of refugees to be granted asylum and eventual citizenship in the self-proclaimed Jewish nation. Translation here retains its two meanings: first, translate as in “to remove from one place to another,” from the Old French translater, derived from the Latin translatus, “carried over” (trans “across, beyond” + latus “borne, carried”); and second, translate as in “to turn from one language to another,” a usage which originated in the early 14th century.3 I examine how the translation— the physical transference across space—of Vietnamese refugees from Southeast Asia to Israel- Palestine necessitated subsequent translations—across language, context, culture, and memory— that are ongoing and multilayered. On a literal level, Vietnamese Israeli families must constantly translate—or “incessant[ly] shuttle,” to quote Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—between Vietnamese, the language of the first generation of refugees, and Hebrew, the language of subsequent generations born in Israel, in their everyday interactions, conversations, and modes of subject formation.4 On a global level, Vietnamese Israeli understandings of refugeehood, home- making, and settlement travel and translate diasporically, from Israel-Palestine to Vietnam, informing the meaning and significance of such terms at multiple sites of archipelagic resettlement. On an analytical level, researchers who study the Vietnamese Israeli population must translate the scholarship on Vietnamese refugees, the vast majority of which refers to a North American context, into the national context of Israel-Palestine.5 Although both settler colonial states that posit themselves as multicultural, Western democracies, the United States and the State of Israel are shaped by different histories, patterns, and dynamics of racial formation that one must attend to when conducting a relational analysis. Translation, in sum, is produced by multiple subjects—Vietnamese Israelis, Palestinians, myself as a curator and critic—across multiple media—language, culture, space, time—and multiple scales—local, global, diasporic, archipelagic. At the crux of this study is the question of potential solidarities: How do Vietnamese Israelis, as citizens of the State of Israel, relate to Palestinians, displaced and dispossessed by this

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very state’s policies of settler colonialism and military occupation? Is solidarity between Vietnamese Israelis and Palestinians even possible, when the condition of political legibility for the former is predicated on what Patrick Wolfe has identified as the structural “elimination” of the latter?6 Under Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish democracy, wherein citizenship is equated with Jewish identity, both Palestinians and Vietnamese Israelis are marginalized, albeit differentially: the former are systematically dispossessed and displaced, while the latter suffer cultural exclusion despite their de jure citizenship. While the Israeli state racializes Palestinians as terrorist threats to national security, Vietnamese Israelis are represented as proof of a multicultural democracy. De jure inclusion of Vietnamese Israelis directs attention away from Israel’s settler colonial exclusion of Palestinians.7 Indeed, the very inclusion of Vietnamese Israelis into a Jewish state promulgates the racialization of Palestinians as the ultimate Other, against which Vietnamese Israelis as “manageable difference” can be comparatively absorbed. Although Palestinians occupy several different structural positions that derive from their geographical location—third-class citizens within Israel’s 1948 borders, surveilled subjects in the West Bank or Gaza, displaced refugees in a temporary camp, or relatively privileged exiles residing abroad—it is important to note that all share the cultural memory of al-Nakbah. This racialized schema pits Vietnamese Israelis against all Palestinians, regardless of their current geographical position, to the benefit of Israeli Zionism, preventing any meaningful coalition between the two populations from yet being realized in the social sphere.8 Such structural antagonisms necessitate a turn to the literary. We do not yet have the political vocabulary to articulate solidarity between Vietnamese Israelis and Palestinians across the impasse of settler colonialism, but a close reading of poetry from these respective communities renders visible resonant “structures of feeling” that have yet to be fully articulated in the social realm; such an analysis offers tools for expanding our political horizons to imagine potentials for solidarity between Vietnamese Israelis and Palestinians.9 Poetry here is not prescriptive but rather suggestive: its questions and gaps present openings for imagining otherwise. Identifying affective and thematic resonances between Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah and Vaan Nguyen’s “Mekong River,” the first part of this chapter attends to the translations—the shuttling movements—between the unstable signifiers of refugee, exile, and native in order to challenge exclusionary land claims. Destabilizing the very categories that pit Palestinians against Vietnamese Israelis, I posit an exilic poetics that forcefully critiques Israeli settler colonialism while simultaneously instantiating pluralized modalities of belonging. Key here is an engagement with temporality: a critique of linear narratives of origin-claiming in favor of a recognition of overlapping “shape[s] of time” (shakl awqātinā fīhi) (Barghouti 41). The second part of this chapter examines the translation—or inevitable mistranslation— of a particular Vietnamese Israeli vocabulary (part Hebrew, part Vietnamese, informed by Israeli politics and refracted through historic refugee passage) from Israel-Palestine to Vietnam. Following Brent Hayes Edwards, scholar of black internationalism, who advocated attention to the ways in which diasporic discourses “are translated, disseminated, reformulated, and debated in transnational contexts marked by difference,” this section analyzes how the refugee settler condition travels and translates diasporically, from Israel-Palestine back to Vietnam.10 What happens when Vietnamese Israelis travel back to Vietnam to reclaim their own ancestral lands, translating the political vocabulary of competing land claims in Israel-Palestine to their diasporic homeland? In a key scene in Duki Dror’s 2005 film, The Journey of Vaan Nguyen, Vaan Nguyen’s father Hoimai refers to the Vietnamese family that settled upon his ancestral lands in olim) עולים חדשים Vietnam after he fled the Communist regime in 1972 using the Hebrew term

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aliyah) which infuses) עֲלִיָּה khadashim), or “new immigrants.” Derived from the Biblical word עולים Jewish immigration with the meaning of an accession to Mount Zion is Jerusalem, the term (olim) is reserved for Jewish immigrants who “return” to Israel. In another layer of translation, the film’s translator interprets this Hebrew word as “settlers” in the film’s English subtitles, with all of that word’s loaded political and affective significance in the Israeli context. How does this word, olim khadashim, travel and translate from the Israel-Palestine context, to Vietnam, to an Anglophone audience, via the English subtitles? Such a startling condensation of multiple diasporic contexts in collision invites comparisons between Israel-Palestine and Vietnam, and the uneven yet perhaps interconnected processes of settlement and land appropriation that structure both sites. Both Israel-Palestine and Vietnam are here connected in an archipelagic fashion around questions of land, indigeneity, settlement, diaspora, and the politics of return. That is, by positioning Hoimai as a dispossessed native Palestinian in opposition to the Communist- sympathetic landowners who appropriated his ancestral lands after he fled Vietnam as a refugee, here figured as Zionist olim khadashim, the film suggests another potential point of identification between Vietnamese Israelis and displaced Palestinians, that must then be retranslated from the Vietnamese context back to Israel-Palestine, if meaningful coalitions are to cohere in the social sphere.

Exilic Poetics: Vietnamese Israelis and the Question of Palestine Born in the West Bank in 1944, Mourid Barghouti (Murīd Barghūthī) was “struck by displacement” on June 10, 1967.11 Because he happened to be at Cairo University taking his final exams when Israeli forces conquered Ramallah, Barghouti graduated a stateless man, unable to return to Palestine. I Saw Ramallah—originally published in Arabic in 1997 under the title Raʾaytu Rām Allāh and then translated into English by the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif in 2000—charts Barghouti’s reflections upon returning to Ramallah after thirty years of forced exile.12 Blending memoir, essay, and prose poetry, Barghouti contrasts his memories of Ramallah and the neighboring village of Deir Ghassanah with the reality of his present moment, marking continuities and disjunctures between his experience as an exile and the experience of Palestinians who stayed in the occupied West Bank. I Saw Ramallah was originally published in the wake of the 1993 Oslo Accords and therefore negotiates the politics of fledgling statehood, embodied by the Palestinian Authority’s newfound though limited jurisdiction over the Occupied Territories. Awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 1997 and the Palestine Prize for Poetry in 2000, and praised by Edward Said as “one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement,” I Saw Ramallah has been adopted by many English-speaking institutions as “the representative text for the contemporary Palestinian perspective.”13 Nonetheless, Anna Bernard draws attention to “Barghouti’s significant departure from the representational conventions of Palestinian literary and political discourse,” as evidenced by the text’s eschewal of hyperbolic metaphor and avant-garde abstraction in favor of an “existential materialist aesthetic” that highlights the everyday “circumstantial diversity of Palestinian lives” and refuses to project a homogenized “shared identity.”14 Although the book does not claim to represent the Palestinian experience writ large, especially given the different subjectivities of those living under occupation and those located in the diaspora, it does “envision a Palestinian unity that does not rely on a narrative of shared identity” and therefore provides a good text for examining the diversity of Palestinian positionalities vis-à-vis that of the Vietnamese Israeli.15 Like Barghouti, I do not intend to homogenize the Palestinian experience, but rather attend to the historical specificity of Palestinian exile, produced by the foundational collective memory of al-

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Nakba, and its resonances with the exilic affects of Vietnamese refugees absorbed into a nation- state that does not recognize their cultural belonging. Born in the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon in 1982 to Vietnamese boat refugees, Vaan .was granted citizenship upon birth into the very state that displaced Barghouti (ואן נויין) Nguyen In 2005 she published her first poems in Ma’ayan, an Israeli anti-establishment journal whose literary and visual content often addresses issues of social justice.16 Three years later, Ma’ayan -Ein Ha ,עַיִן הכמהין) released both digital and print copies of Nguyen’s chapbook, The Truffle Eye kemehin); in 2013, Nguyen’s chapbook was revised and expanded into a book with the same Nehar ha-Mekong), is ,נהר המקונג) ”title.17 The book, which opens with the poem “Mekong River the first Hebrew-language collection of poetry published by a Vietnamese Israeli.18 Rich, sensual, and fleeting, Nguyen’s short poems in verse explore in startling collage-like fashion themes of sexuality, travel, disease, and alienation, citing cosmopolitan cities in Israel, France, the Netherlands, Vietnam, and the United States. Refusing to ventriloquize Israel’s monopolistic refugee rhetoric, Nguyen asserts her own experiences of affective displacement and diasporic restlessness, as a Vietnamese Israeli in a self-identified Jewish nation. Although Nguyen’s poetry has been interpreted within an Israeli literary tradition of Jewish diaspora and exile—a liberal move meant to counter her cultural exclusion from Israeli society—I want to translate it into a Palestinian literary tradition of displacement and exile, as exemplified by Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah.19 Although Nguyen’s and Barghouti’s poetry differ in style, both reflect upon themes of cultural displacement, listless travel, and restless memories. Neither text explicitly articulates solidarity between Palestinians and Vietnamese Israelis. However, both texts identify the “incessant shuttle”—the multiple overlaps and translations— between the seemingly stable categories of native, refugee, and exile.20 Furthermore, the affective parallels between these two works via an “accented” exilic poetics suggest potential points of what Stuart Hall terms “articulation”: divergent “structures of feeling” shaped by different racialized positions that nonetheless produce an assemblage of unity-in-difference.21 Correspondingly, rather than conflate the experiences and structural positions of Palestinians and Vietnamese Israelis under the Zionist settler colonial state of Israel, I attend to the connections and contradictions of this particular articulation of unity-in-difference. The exilic poetics produced via a relational analysis of Barghouti and Nguyen’s work offers tools for conceptualizing a yet-to-be-realized project of political solidarity: one that envisions pluralized belonging in a reimagined Israel-Palestine. As explained in chapter four, Palestinians have had a vexed relationship to the status of “refugee” ever since its inception as an internationally-recognized legal category: they are excluded from the purview of the international 1951 Refugee Convention and the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR). In I Saw Ramallah, Barghouti further problematizes the use of the term “refugees” to describe ’48 Palestinians in particular—those displaced to the Occupied Territories by the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948: How can we explain today, now that we have grown older and wiser, that we on the West Bank treated our people as refugees? Yes, our own people, banished by Israel from their coastal cities and villages in 1948, our people who had to move from one part of the homeland to another and came to live in our cities and towns, we called them refugees! We called them immigrants! Who can apologize to them? Who can apologize to us? Who can explain this great confusion to whom?22 With his searching questions and exclamations, Barghouti reminds the reader that displacement does not necessarily map onto refugeehood, and that to uncritically assume so is to concede to a

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settler colonial mapping of the world.23 If we take seriously Giorgio Agamben’s argument that the refugee is “nothing less than a limit concept that radically calls into question the fundamental categories of the nation-state”—that indeed, as Hannah Arendt argued over four decades earlier, the refugee did not exist prior to the conception of the nation-state as a socio-political entity— then to call the ’48 Palestinians “refugees” is to accept the settler-colonial mapping of ’48 Palestine as the sovereign nation-state of Israel, ontologically distinct from the West Bank.24 “Refugee” in this context connotes geographic displacement from one’s land, not the re-naming of one’s land by a colonizing power. Put otherwise, to call ’48 Palestinians “refugees” (lājiʾīn) and “immigrants” (muhājirīn) is to concede that the land within the State of Israel’s proclaimed borders is no longer a part of a larger Palestine that includes the West Bank and Gaza. Such categories naturalize and de-historicize the State of Israel’s control over this part of Palestine, relinquishing a native Palestinian claim to the land.25 Barghouti’s searching questions—“Who can apologize to them? Who can apologize to us? Who can explain this great confusion to whom?”—decenter Zionist authority, instead grappling with these internal divisions within the Palestinian community. While attending to differences in power, responsibility is here redistributed horizontally: Palestinians require apologies from not only Israeli Zionists, but also one another for the misdiagnosis of their displaced condition. Barghouti’s own native claim to the land does not reproduce oppositional exclusivity: a mere inversion of “Israel for the Jewish Israelis” to “Palestine for the Arab Palestinians,” a binary which erases the subjectivity of Arab Jews, the Mizrahim, who make up the majority of Israel’s population.26 Rather, it is marked by an exilic poetics. According to Bryan Cheyette, the term “exile” is “disruptive and intransigent and not redeemed by a sense of nationalist return.”27 Although Cheyette here critiques the exclusionary rhetoric of Zionism, the term “refugee” is also indicative of a particular logic of nationalist return: a return to citizenship, via absorption into a stable nation-state. In “Reflections on Exile,” Edward Said explicitly distinguishes the refugee— “a creation of the twentieth-century state,” via this ethno-nationalist logic of exclusion and re- absorption—from the exile, positing the latter’s “contrapuntal” “plurality of vision.”28 This plurality is characterized by an awareness of multiply existing cultures, settings, and homes within a single landscape that necessitates what critic Zahi Zalloua identifies as a “double consciousness, a parallax perspective,” that can “bear witness to the interdependence of viewpoints or voices.”29 Exilic affects, in turn, “unsettle the cultural script of rootedness and national belonging.”30 Crossing the Amman Bridge separating Jordan from the West Bank for the first time in thirty years, Barghouti reflects: And now I pass from my exile to their . . . homeland? My homeland? The West Bank and Gaza? The Occupied Territories? The Areas? Judea and Samaria? The Autonomous Government? Israel? Palestine? Is there any other country in the world that so perplexes you with its names?31 Articulating an exilic contrapuntal sensibility that “diminish[es] orthodox judgment and elevate[s] appreciative sympathy,” Barghouti acknowledges multiple mappings of the land: a move that insists upon Palestinians’ right to return to their homes at the same time that it recognizes overlapping claims to the space, both juridical—“The Areas,” the “Autonomous Government” of the Palestinian Authority—and affective—“their . . . homeland?”, “My homeland?”32 With this reference to “their . . . homeland?” (waṭanihim), Barghouti acknowledges the Zionists’ rhetorical claim to indigeneity, which argues that the Jewish people .Eretz Israel) long before the arrival of the Palestinians ,ארץ ישראל) lived in the land of Israel

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But the choice of punctuation—ellipses and a question mark—both queries and challenges such a claim. This is followed not by a declarative indigenous claim of his own, but rather by another, albeit less hesitant, question: “My homeland?” (waṭanī). In this passage, Barghouti demonstrates how one can simultaneously embody both the native and exile position: the exile may insist upon native claims to the land while simultaneously acknowledging overlaid temporalities of indigeneity, thus demonstrating an exilic sensibility. To be clear, such acknowledgment does not condone Zionist dispossession of native Palestinians, but rather imagines a space of pluralized belonging that recognizes Palestinians’ Right of Return. More probing than declarative, Barghouti’s string of questions point us toward an emergent vision of a secular bi-national state that would embrace Jews and Palestinians alike, as has historically been imagined by leftist groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in the 1970s. In Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, Judith Butler also invokes the power of a bi-national state to bring justice to displaced Palestinians. Arguing that the “Palestinian diaspora” remain crucial to “any understanding of the Palestinian nation,” she proposes a deterritorialized conceptualization, wherein “the nation is partially scattered,” the “rights of those who have been forcibly expelled from their own homes and lands” are honored, and “Palestine is not bound by any existing or negotiated borders.”33 Butler asks how a radical sense of bi-nationalism—that is, a nationalism articulated through the differences and connections between Palestinian and Jewish exilic longings for home, rather than the cementation of ethno-nationalist difference propagated by a “two-state solution”—could reimagine the configuration of a nation-state.34 Pushed further, this reconfiguration, which challenges the exclusionary logic of “one people, one land,” could also open up a “third space” for conceptualizing inclusion of those who are neither Palestinian, Jewish, nor both.35 That is, a radical multi-nationalism engenders spaces for envisioning Vietnamese Israeli belonging, not predicated upon Palestinian dispossession in a reimagined Israel-Palestine. Like displaced Palestinians, Vietnamese Israelis have a vexed relationship to the term “refugee.” In “Re-placing the Accent: From the Exile to Refugee Position,” Timothy K. August contrasts a Southeast Asian refugee aesthetic to that of the exile, arguing that while the latter— often marked by the figure of the elite intellectual—occupies multiple worlds and thus critiques the very idea of a stable national homeland, the former defiantly claims space within the nation- state in order to critique exclusionary nationalism from within.36 Such formulations encompass a politics resistant to the racial hierarchies of the United States. But what are the ethical and political implications of a Vietnamese refugee claiming space within Israel, whose self-definition as a Jewish state necessitates the dispossession and displacement of native Palestinians? Given the history of settler colonialism in Israel-Palestine, and the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the Vietnamese refugee population in Israel presents a significant case study for taking seriously “refugee settler colonialism”—a term that implicates those who are not directly responsible for the Zionist foundation of Israel but who nonetheless benefit from Israeli state policies of Palestinian dispossession. Vaan Nguyen’s poetry has not previously been read in relation to Palestinian poetics. In “Where Are You From,” Adriana X. Jacobs counters racialized comments about the “exotic” nature of Nguyen’s poetry by re-incorporating her into “contemporary Israeli letters,” arguing that Nguyen’s work exemplifies “cosmopolitan and transnational movements” characteristic of a “twenty-first century Israeli mode of travel and translation.”37 In contrast to this liberal multicultural move to absorb Nguyen’s difference into an Israeli literary tradition, I probe points of articulation between Nguyen’s work and Palestinian exilic literature as exemplified by

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Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah, hoping to critique the Zionist rhetoric that underpins much of Israeli poetry, whether explicitly or implicitly. Figuring the Vietnamese Israeli as a refugee rather than a citizen, and refusing the implicit binary proposed by August’s formulation of an exile-versus-refugee aesthetic, I identify in Nguyen’s poetry an exilic poetics: a vocabulary for imagining political solidarities with displaced Palestinians across the impasse of settler colonialism. That is, by undermining affects of settlement and belonging, the refugee settler can query the exclusionary logic of the settler colonial state. Read next to Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah, Vaan Nguyen’s The Truffle Eye troubles the refugee/exile distinction by questioning the presumed teleology of the refugee. Within legal discourse, the refugee is posed as a “problem” to be solved: a stateless body that must be absorbed into the safety of a self-contained nation-state. Because it indexes the anxieties and inadequacies of this dominant nation-state model, the refugee condition is conceptualized as a temporary status. In contrast, exile often connotes a longer temporality, marked by displacement across multiple generations. Because she was born a citizen in Israel, Nguyen is not technically a refugee. However, drawing from the work of Vietnamese American scholars and artists as well as Marianne Hirsch’s idea of “postmemory,” I question this teleology of the refugee, arguing that like the condition of exile, affective refugeehood—and the external imposition of a refugee identity—does not dissolve after the first generation’s legal absorption into the nation- state of asylum.38 Furthermore, given her own former non-Jewish status, Nguyen’s legal inclusion into the Jewish state of Israel is actually predicated upon her parents’ identity as Vietnamese refugees: Israel does not have birthright citizenship, so children born in Israel to non-citizens are not automatically granted Israeli citizenship.39 Nguyen’s citizenship is thus dependent on her parents’ legal absorption into the State of Israel. Nguyen’s parents were part of the third wave of Vietnamese refugees. They had fled Vietnam by boat in 1977, after North Vietnamese Communists murdered Nguyen’s grandfather.40 Their boat reached the Philippines, but they were barred from entering the country, confined to a refugee camp until Prime Minister Begin brought them to Israel in 1979 and offered them citizenship. In a 2008 interview published in Ha’aretz, Israel’s oldest daily newspaper, Nguyen relates: They were taken to an absorption center in the Negev town of Sderot and forgotten forever. My parents were transparent: No one took any interest in them. They left the ulpan [intensive Hebrew course] after three months without having learned Hebrew, in order to work in factories in the Sderot area. Very quickly they decided to move to the big city in the expectation of finding a better livelihood. They moved around between Holon, Rishon Letzion and Bat Yam, and in the end settled in Jaffa - not the pastoral tourist part, but the section that is far from the sea. My parents worked mostly in kitchens, doing jobs that did not require language.41 Their absorption into Israel guaranteed Nguyen’s status as an Israeli citizen. This legal inclusion does not necessarily translate into equal opportunity in Israeli society, however. Today, Vietnamese Israelis—whose estimated numbers range from 150 to 400—live in the poor, racialized neighborhoods of Israel’s cities and are concentrated in low-income jobs such as restaurant cook, hotel chambermaid, or factory worker. First-generation refugees struggle to learn Hebrew, and second-generation citizens face racial and religious discrimination in an already saturated job market.42 Legal inclusion does not guarantee cultural inclusion either. Despite her ability to live in the land of her birth, Nguyen writes poems that address her feelings

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of displacement and exile in a country in which citizenship is equated with Jewishness, excluding those racialized as Asian. Most Asians in Israel are temporary workers from Thailand, China, and the Philippines, who have no legal pathway to citizenship.43 An Orientalizing gaze often interpellates Vietnamese Israelis as these foreign workers, denying them de facto citizenship. Situated against this vexed imaginary, the refugee condition—un-belonging in the nation-state—does not disappear after the singular event of parental absorption. In “Mekong River,” the opening poem of The Truffle Eye, Nguyen invokes exilic affects—“nomadic, decentered, contrapuntal”—to describe this refugee condition.44 Over twenty-six lines divided into two odd-numbered stanzas, the poem shifts between Southeast Asia and the Middle East, marking fleeting but intense encounters both bodily and sexual. Indexing the vexed positionality of the Vietnamese Israeli, the poem blurs the line between love (absorption) and violence (cooptation). Charting restless movement and multiple belongings, the first stanza begins: Tonight I moved between three beds like I was sailing on the Mekong and whispered the beauty of the Tigris and Euphrates.45 Here Nguyen references the multiple locations that make up her Vietnamese Israeli identity: a bricolage of places that are simultaneously grounded in geographical referents and references (מקונג) ”metaphorically brought together in the space of Nguyen’s poem. “Mekong the Mekong River that runs through Vietnam and enters the sea at the southwestern border of the country. Although the narrator sails the Mekong, suggesting placement in Southeast Asia, she -yephi ha-Perat ve ,יפי הפרת והחדקל) ”whispers “the beauty of the Tigris and Euphrates hakhideqel), rivers that run through the Middle Eastern countries that surround Israel and a whose governments critique Israel’s settlement and occupation of Palestine. Moreover, the narrator “moved between three beds,” suggesting the inability to find one single bed, one single space, to call home. Here Nguyen characterizes the affect of exile not as a loss, but as a multiplicity indicative of pluralized belongings. It is this plurality—or inability to claim Israel as one’s sole bed or space of belonging—that renders possible another plurality: the inability to claim Israel solely for oneself. Plurality, however, is marked not by utopic celebration, but by restless travel, existential exile, and state-imposed violence. The first stanza continues: Under an endless moment looking below the left tit I have a hole and you fill it with other men.46 Rather than settling unproblematically, the refugee settler-turned-exile is constantly “looking” under “an endless moment” for the sense of belonging promised by the Zionist state. This state, however, violently absorbs the Vietnamese Israeli narrator, populating her story with its own multicultural narrative: “I have a hole/and you fill it/with other men.” Staged as a sexual encounter, these lines call attention to the violent intimacy that can characterize refugees’ relationships to the nation-states that absorb them. To return to the beginning of the first stanza: If we read Vietnam (Mekong) as one bed/home of belonging, and the Middle East (Tigris and Euphrates) as another, then what space does the third bed connote? Interpreted as metonymy, the concluding two lines of this stanza— “Notes of Tiger beer/on your body”—offer one suggestion: the United States. Tiger Beer, an

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American Adjunct Lager style beer brewed by Asia Pacific Breweries Ltd., indexes the obfuscated role of the U.S. in connecting the previous two beds/homes and thus producing the conditions of emergence for the Vietnamese Israeli figure. U.S. military intervention in Vietnam contributed to the post-1975 refugee exodus, and U.S. defense aid to Israel propagates the Israeli settlement of Palestine. Furthermore, given the U.S.’s lead role in defining a moral imperative to absorb Vietnamese refugees after the Vietnam War, which Yến Lê Espiritu has termed the “We- win-even-when-we-lose” syndrome, Israel was motivated to absorb Vietnamese refugees in the late 1970s in order to emulate the U.S.’s example and project itself as a Western democracy sympathetic to international concerns.47 Referencing the “crickets [that] drone south of Laos,” the “Showers of cold air from Hanoi” and an “ink stain on the belly,” the second stanza continues the first stanza’s images of restless movement and vexed intimate encounters. It concludes with six lines that further question the humanitarian rhetoric of Israel’s absorption of Vietnamese refugees: I’ll release roots at your feet, I want to come to puke specks of dust in my crotch. Rest your hand in my pants. Make it personal Who abandons an illness in open sea?48 Here Nguyen compares the releasing of roots to the puking of dust specks, problematizing the romanticized narrative of the refugee planting new roots—new tendrils of belonging—in the adoptive country of her rescue. Furthermore, the act of releasing roots comes here not from internal desire, but rather from external imperative: “I’ll release roots at your feet” suggests an imposed genuflection, symbolizing subordination. Addressing the State of Israel, Nguyen shows how the absorption of Vietnamese refugees assisted not only the beneficiaries, but also the benefactors: sidestepping critiques of its discrimination against Palestinians, the State of Israel touted the absorbed Vietnamese refugees as proof of Israel’s benevolent, multicultural democracy. מעז לעזב מחלה באמצע ׳ם?) ”?The last striking line—“Who abandons an illness in open sea Mi me‘ez la-azov ma-halah be-emtsah yam?)—most succinctly encapsulates the themes of ,מי this poem. Nguyen reveals how the State of Israel, like many nation-states, represented the Vietnamese refugee boat people such as her parents as an “illness” that must be cured with re- absorption into a nation-state. Such logic however does not acknowledge how nation-states produce their own displaced populations, by nature of their exclusive borders. By parodying the State of Israel’s incredulous rhetorical question directed at its surrounding Arab nations for not absorbing Vietnamese refugees—“Who abandons an illness in open sea?”—Nguyen highlights the irony of a state responsible for millions of Palestinians’ displacement boasting about “saving” refugees from statelessness. Lastly, the poem leaves the temporality of “illness” ambiguous: once absorbed, do Vietnamese Israelis continue to be marked as diseased subjects, a latent threat to the healthy Jewish body politic? Indeed, perhaps this association with illness is one vector by which Vietnamese Israelis as refugee settlers can reject affective settlement, mobilizing their threatening subjectivity to undermine the settler colonial project: “I want to come to puke specks/of dust/in my crotch.”49 Throughout the poem, Nguyen uses water rather than land to mark space. In Vietnamese, nước means water, country, and homeland; homeland here thus refers to fluid movement and liquid borders, which do more to mark the shifting perimeters of belonging than

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they do to exclude those racialized as Other. Water brings to mind as well not only displacement—the iconic figure of the Vietnamese “boat people”—but also movement and travel, critiquing the equation of belonging with nativity and fixity. In the last line, “Who abandons an illness in open sea?”, the “open sea” is represented as an illegible space of un- belonging. However, the concept of nước opens up space for conceiving of water as a homeland, indexing vexed belonging in a pluralized space of travel, exile, and fluidity.50 Translating between multiple temporalities is key for articulating a homeland that envisions simultaneous belonging for the refugee, exile, and native via a destabilization of these very terms of engagement. Such translations are concretized by Barghouti’s concept of a “shape of time” (shakl awqātinā fīhi).51 Towards the middle of his book Barghouti asks what David Farrier has identified as the “central question” of the text: “Does a poet live in space or in time?”52 Answering his own query, Barghouti replies: “Our homeland is the shape of the time we spent in it.”53 Homeland here is not defined exclusively by space—by an exclusive claim to space—but by time. Critiquing a teleological logic of land rights based on the question of origins—Who was here first? Who owns the original title to the land?—this definition of homeland as a “shape of time” opens up discursive space for recognizing multiple layers of shapes and times. Although Native studies scholars have cautioned against the uncritical use of temporality to undermine native claims to land-based sovereignty, adding the dimension of time enables an acknowledgment of the plurality of overlapping claims to the land. It also adds a much-needed temporal element to the uptake of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s epistemology-shifting work on rhizomes by theorists of exile and diaspora.54 This move takes seriously indigenous critiques of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine at the same time that it recognizes multiple modes of belonging: Israelites in the Promised Land, Palestinians on their ancestral lands, Vietnamese Israelis in a state of refuge. Acknowledging these overlapping modalities, Barghouti writes of Israel-Palestine: “the place is for the enemy and the place is for us, the story is their story and the story is our story. I mean, at the same time.”55 However, such parallelism and simultaneity does not lead to “two equal rights to the land,” given that the Zionists “took our entire space and exiled us from it.”56 Barghouti clarifies that “When we were in Palestine, we were not afraid of the Jews,” and only after they “took the space with the power of the sacred and with the sacredness of power, with the imagination, and with geography” (akhadha ‘l-makān bi quwwat al-muqaddas wa bi qadāsat al-quwwa, bi ‘l-khayāl wa bi ‘l-jughrāfiyyā), did they “bec[o]me an enemy.”57 Advocating on behalf of the Palestinian Right of Return, Barghouti reminds the reader of a time and place—a space of time—before Israeli Jews and native Palestinians were considered enemies, before Vietnamese Israelis would have been positioned as refugee settlers; a space of time toward which one should orient decolonization struggles for justice. Conceiving “imagination” (al-khayāl) and “geography” (al-jughrāfiyyā) as powerful tools of dispossession, Barghouti suggests that such tools be repurposed for a pluralized sense of belonging. Negotiating Native studies scholars’ concerns regarding conceptual moves that displace geography as a central political and theoretical analytic, I echo Mishuana Goeman’s “move toward geographies that do not limit, contain, or fix the various scales of space from the body to nation in ways that limit definitions of self and community staked out as property.”58 Attending to various scales of not only space but also time, I argue that such geographies do not envision exile and indigeneity in opposition: despite Barghouti’s long years in exile, he does not surrender a native claim to Palestine; although Vietnamese Israelis are exiles on foreign land, they might begin to articulate a sense of belonging that acknowledges and critiques structures of settler colonialism. Indeed, geography is

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not opposed to time, but rather is a heuristic through which to articulate overlapping shapes of time. In the second stanza of “Mekong River,” Nguyen writes: Draw me a monochrome flow chart on fresh potted flowers.59 tarshim zerimah/ be-tsevah akhid) connotes ,תרשים זרימה/ בצבע אחיד) ”A “monochrome/flow chart linear temporality and unambiguous causality. However, “fresh/potted flowers” bring to mind the promise of verdant growth, marking the potential for this “flow chart” to flower, elongate, and entwine. These fertile shifts—which disrupt linear causality by extending forwards, backwards, and horizontally—parallel Barghouti’s vision of overlapping shapes of time. Indeed, when Barghouti writes that he now “want[s] borders that I later will come to hate”, he articulates his desire for a “flow chart”—a sense of stability and (b)order—that has the flexibility to change with the inevitability of flowering growth.60 Building on Edward Said’s “Reflections on Exile,” I suggest that an exilic poetics acknowledges the differential power dynamics structuring multiple claims of belonging, at the same time that it insists that affective displacement has the potential to generate plural understandings of home. However exile should not be romanticized or uncritically aestheticized; a “discontinuous state of being,” exile has “torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family, and geography.”61 It is saturated with the risks of loss and rootless liminality. Yet the figure of the exile—perhaps more than the figure of the refugee who can gain de jure belonging through reabsorption into a nation-state—indexes the troubles of equating belonging with an exclusionary national identity. An exilic poetics articulates pluralized belonging via potentially more inclusive images of a home(land) such as nước and a shape of time. It is this expanded understanding of home that offers a political vocabulary for conceptualizing potential points of articulation between Vietnamese Israelis and displaced Palestinians—a vocabulary that charts connections between the destabilized figures of native, refugee, and exile. Exilic poetics do not automatically lead to political solidarity or settler decolonization; more work must be done to translate these affective resonances into a social strategy. However, my hope is that this poetics may offer a language for conceptualizing coalitional politics between differentially racialized communities—displaced Palestinians and Vietnamese Israeli refugee settlers—within what today is Israel-Palestine, but tomorrow may be a different shape of time.

“Olim Khadashim”: Translating “New Immigrants” from Israel-Palestine to Vietnam The imperfections of translation—movement, transference, and risk of misinterpretation—are prominently negotiated in the documentary, The Journey of Vaan Nguyen. Directed by Duki Dror, an Israeli documentarian of Iraqi heritage who studied film in the United States, The Journey of Vaan Nguyen premiered at the Jerusalem Film Festival on 29 September Hamasa shel Vaan).62 There are two versions of the) ”המסע של ואן“ under the Hebrew title 2005 film—a short version and a director’s cut—that circulated and screened at film festivals around the world. The characters in The Journey of Vaan Nguyen switch rapidly between Hebrew and Vietnamese, and because very few people are fluent in both languages—even the Vietnamese Israelis in the documentary experience difficulty communicating across generation and

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language—the film depends on translations to proffer meaning: subtitles provide either Hebrew or English translations, depending on where the film is screened.63 When reading their own poetry, the two main characters of the film, Vaan Nguyen and her father Hoimai Nguyen—a name that also bears the mark of diasporic translation from its original Vietnamese spelling, “Hoài Mỹ”—speak in their respective native languages: Hebrew and Vietnamese.64 But when they speak to each other, they switch between (native) Hebrew, (Vietnamese-accented) Hebrew, (native) Vietnamese, and (Hebrew-accented) Vietnamese, sometimes changing mid-sentence, cobbling together a shared language across the potential impasses of translation. This linguistic diversity is not captured by the film’s English subtitles, however, which do not distinguish between the multiple languages. Unless they can identify the auditory differences between Vietnamese, Hebrew, and their respective accented variations, English-speaking viewers may miss these frequent linguistic switches. Presented with the fiction of a homogenized, unmediated access to the film’s narration, voice-over, and dialogue, English-speaking viewers are not directly confronted with the problems of translation that the film negotiates and highlights. Not only are the English subtitles often inaccurate; they also smooth out the grammatical mistakes and hesitant vocabularies of the Vietnamese Israeli characters, who attempt to communicate with each other without formal training in the other’s native tongue. In essence, the subtitles hide the everyday labor of translation that Vietnamese Israelis perform in their quotidian interactions. The Journey of Vaan Nguyen achieved global acclaim: it won a Remi Award at the Houston World Fest and was an Official Selection of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). However, it is addressed primarily to an Israeli audience. The director, Duki Dror, is an Israeli documentarian of Iraqi descent whose films explore themes of migration, displacement, and racialized nonbelonging in Israel. Zygote Films Ltd, the Israeli company that produced the film, was created by Dror in 2002 to “explore the complex social, cultural, and political fault lines of the Middle East.” Furthermore, a Hebrew voiceover introduces and interweaves the distinct narratives of Hoimai and Vaan. Hoimai’s narrative charts his passage from Israel to his hometown in a small village in Hội An district, Bình Định province, in Central Vietnam. Almost thirty years after his initial refugee flight from the country, Hoimai returns to reclaim his ancestral lands. Hoimai had fled his village in 1972, his life threatened by the Communist-sympathetic mayor who had taken control after disposing of Hoimai’s father, Nguyễn Khắc Minh. In Hoimai’s absence, his family’s lands were confiscated by the Communist government and redistributed as part of the post-1975 land reform program. The film charts Hoimai’s attempts to locate and reclaim his ancestral lands. Vaan’s narrative in turn emphasizes the affects of displacement and unbelonging that characterize her life in Israel as a non-Jewish Asian. Halfway through the film, she follows her father from Israel to Vietnam to help him reclaim his lands, hoping as well to find a final sense of belonging in the land of her ethnic heritage. However, by the end of the film, she realizes that she “feels Vietnamese in Israel and Israeli in Vietnam.”65 In the film’s penultimate scene, images of Vaan walking along a Saigon street crowded by mopeds are accompanied by a voiceover in which Vaan admits, “I don’t consider myself a part of all these slanted eyed faces, but I’m aware that I fit in with my looks. If the shop windows were mirrors, I would see that I fit in. But I don’t feel that way. I’m here as a tourist, as an Israeli.”66 Her Hebrew-accented Vietnamese, assertive manner, and Western clothes set her apart and distinguish her as Việt Kiều, an overseas Vietnamese marked by exilic affects. Indeed, when someone calls her a Việt Kiều, Vaan takes it as a sign of her unbelonging in Vietnam: “When the words were uttered, I officially became a foreigner.”67 Southeast Asian

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film scholar and independent curator Võ Hồng Chương-Đài explains: “Despite its seemingly neutral translation, Việt Kiều often is used derogatorily and carries with it the baggage of civil war and imperial history—local Vietnamese’s resentment toward those who were able to flee the devastated country and who are now citizens and residents of more prosperous, usually Western, nations.”68 Vaan records her reflections on the trip in her Hebrew-language blog, “A Jaffran in Saigon,” which she reads in snippets via voice-over throughout the film.69 Indeed, The Journey of Vaan Nguyen “introduced Nguyen as a poet”: the film is interspersed with shots of Vaan typing at a computer, journaling, and speaking into a voice recorder, marking the first time that her writing was presented to a global audience.70 It would be several more years until Vaan published her first book of Hebrew-language poetry, The Truffle Eye. The film’s title, The Journey of Vaan Nguyen, and film’s targeting of an Israeli audience, presumably more interested in problems of domestic racism than in questions of Vietnamese politics, seems to privilege Vaan’s narrative over that of her father. In a scene perhaps anticipated by audiences familiar with the genre of second-generation narratives of parental immigration and cultural dissonance that are so prevalent in Asian American cultural production, Vaan complains about the endless questions about her appearance and her place in Israeli society that she is called on to answer every day. Shots of Vaan waiting in the Tel Aviv airport for her flight to Vietnam to join her father, and then riding in a taxi in Saigon, are stitched together by a continuous, bitter voiceover in which Vaan addresses Israel directly: Goodbye wonderful country, your humble servant offers you this song on the way to Vietnam. This journey is made out of bitterness and anger—may I never return. I’m not accepted . . . because of my appearance, my religion, my nationality, my immigrant soul. Enough. I’m tired, fed up, traumatized by life’s experiences. I want to write. I want to go to the store without having people pry into my private life, asking so many questions because I look suspicious or so very interesting. I want them to quit the UFO investigations and the demand that I politely clap my hands and sing: “I was born in Israel, my parents are Vietnamese refugees, who came in 1979, when Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who had just been elected, decided that his first official act would be to let in some Boat People as a humanitarian identification with the exile so familiar to the Jewish people.” No, I’m not Jewish. I don’t know if I’ll convert and whether or not my child will be circumcised. I don’t know in what section of the cemetery I prefer to be buried or according to which religious affiliation. Yeah, I feel sorry for everyone who died or was jailed regardless of whatever religion or nationality was reported in most recent statistics of the last Intifada. I observe Holocaust Day . . . and anyhow I’m not fucking any Arabs at the moment. I have no idea how you tell the difference between Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Filipino, and Korean. I don’t think that my eyes are slanted because I grew up eating rice every day. Yes, I bet my skin is smoother. Yes, I do have cellulite. No, I don’t comb my hair a hundred times a day. No, I’m not related to Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan. Hello in Vietnamese is chào, I love you is Anh yêu em. And Vân (Vaan) is a synonym for cloud. Now can I have some peace and quiet?71 In the self-proclaimed Jewish nation of Israel, Vaan is read as a perpetual foreigner, an alien (UFO), a potential Palestinian-sympathizer, a latent threat to the precarious Jewish demographic majority, and an Oriental oddity, despite her birth in Israel and her fluency in Hebrew. Such themes appear in Vaan’s poetry as well, shedding light on the difficulties of growing up Vietnamese Israeli in Israel. However, this scene doesn’t appear until the halfway point in the film’s eighty-minute runtime, a rather late occurrence for a film’s main narrative crystallization.

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Such placement suggests that Vaan’s story may not be as central—or rather, not as overpowering relative to Hoimai’s narrative—as the film’s title would lead the viewer to believe. Indeed, the title itself is perhaps a product of a subtitle’s mistranslation, or more generously, creative interpretation, of the film’s Vietnamese dialogue. The trailer for The Journey of Vaan Nguyen provides one explanation for the film’s title. In the trailer’s penultimate scene, a Vietnamese villager who currently owns a house on Hoimai’s ancestral lands tells Hoimai as Vaan looks on, “Người ta nói, cuối cùng, không có đâu giống như quê hương.” The English subtitles translate this as “At the end of the journey, there is no place like home,” after which the trailer cuts to a close up shot of Vaan walking by herself at night along the streets of Saigon, framed to the left by the text of the film’s English title in yellow letters: The Journey of Vaan Nguyen. The visual repetition on screen of the word “journey,” juxtaposed against the truism “there is no place like home”—a Wizard of Oz reference—calls into question the inanity of the supposed truism.72 For Vaan Nguyen, a Vietnamese Israeli who feels distanced and alienated both in Israel and Vietnam, the platitude “there is no place like home” might speak less to a sense of cherished uniqueness of an abstract home, than to the fact that for those marked by refugee displacement and exilic affects, there is indeed “no place [that can feel] like home.” Home rather is distributed diasporically, an archipelago of settlement and unsettlement. Spun more positively, and foreshadowing Vaan’s poem “Mekong River” discussed in the above section, there is perhaps no one place that can feel like home for those caught in translation between multiple cultures, countries, and languages, opening up the possibility for a radical multiplicity of belonging: there is no one place to call home, and no one population that can monopolize Israel-Palestine, or Vietnam, as their legitimate home, to the exclusion of others. And it is at the end of the film, “at the end of the journey”—The Journey of Vaan Nguyen (to Vietnam from Israel)—that Vaan comes to this conclusion. This reading of the trailer’s play on words is premised on the film’s English subtitles, flashed—not spoken—on the bottom of the screen in white text, moments before the yellow text of the film’s English title appears in the next shot. A more accurate translation of the Vietnamese man’s statement, however, does not include the word “journey” (cuộc hành trình) at all. “Người ta nói, cuối cùng, không có đâu giống như quê hương” translates more precisely to “People say, in the end, there is no place like home.” Furthermore, the word for “home” used here, quê hương, is marked by national overtones, meaning specifically “homeland” or “country.” In other words, there is no place that can surpass the importance, the pull, of one’s homeland—the land of one’s home. Without the repetition of the English word “journey” to connect this Vietnamese man’s quote to the title of the film, The Journey of Vaan Nguyen, the above reading of the title’s significance, and the centrality of Vaan’s narrative that it proposes, unravels.73 If the film’s title is based on a mistranslation (“in the end” versus “at the end of the journey”), and misrepresents the prominence of Vaan’s second-generation narrative over that of her father’s, then what is the anchor of the film? What is its central theme? The invocation of quê hương—home/land—offers an indication. In another key moment of the film’s narrative crystallization, that occurs a quarter of the way into the film, Hoimai rummages through a pile of old letters kept in a small box and selects one to read aloud. The camera cuts between shots of Hoimai reading, Vaan and her sisters listening, and Vaan’s mother cooking in the family’s small apartment in Jaffa. On the film’s audio track, Hoimai reads the letter addressed to his siblings, scattered in the post-war diaspora, reminiscing on how they had left their homeland decades ago, escaping through the rainfall of bombs. The letter was written during Tết, Vietnamese New

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Year, and Hoimai recalls praying to his ancestors to return to the family’s ancestral lands. In a poetic line in the middle of the letter, Hoimai intones, “xa hang đưa vòng trái đất,” bemoaning his distance from the earth, here figured as the land of his birth. The word for land here, “trái đất,” takes on the planetary dimensions of Earth, extending beyond the nationalistic overtones of the previous word, “quê hương.” Questions concerning the land—and by extension Hoimai’s narrative—thus anchor the film. Indeed, the director, Duki Dror, might have been concerned about the over-prominence of Hoimai’s narrative relative to Vaan’s, rather than vice versa, given the content of the film’s deleted final scene (included in the “Special Features” section of the film’s DVD version). In this scene, Hoimai drives Vaan’s younger sister Hoa, who flies to Vietnam at a later date to join her father and sister, on a moped through the streets of Saigon. He tells her of his plans to purchase lands to build a house in Vietnam, and she smiles silently in response. Rather than end here, the final version of the film decides to end with a voice-over from Vaan, who bemoans her feelings of exile and displacement: “It’s tiring, and I want to rest. I can rest here. But it feels foreign to me now. I want to be home with my sisters. But I also want so many other things.” The images cut between shots of Vaan crying in a hotel room, directing her words to the camera, and walking along the busy streets of Saigon. Rather than ending the film with a scene of aspiration, promise, and homemaking—Hoimai’s insistence that he will successfully reclaim his lands, despite diegetic indications of his failure—the film concludes with Vaan’s monologue on homelessness, restless wandering, and cultural exile. Setting aside the film’s misleading title, the film’s actual emphasis on land and land contestations—alienation from one’s ancestral lands due to government dispossession— translates this documentary from a genre of films about second-generation assimilation and cultural hybridity, to a genre of films concerned with land rights, settler colonialism, and Indigenous resistance. Or rather more precisely, The Journey of Vaan Nguyen constantly shuttles between these two narratives, these two genres, holding them in tension without contradiction, articulating uncanny parallels between the political positionalities of refugees, refugee settlers, natives, exiles. In the film, Hoimai visits Chú Kỳ, the landlord who currently owns and rents out Hoimai’s ancestral lands. Distinguished as an “Honorable War Hero” by the Communist government, Chú Kỳ received Hoimai’s ancestral lands as part of the Vietnamese state’s post- war land redistribution program, which transferred land deeds from anti-Communist traitors to Communist patriots. As the camera looks on, Hoimai explains his family’s attachment to the land and asks Chú Kỳ to “transfer it back to my family, to give it back so that my children may know their roots.” But Chú Kỳ responds that the “government has the right to grant [the land] to someone else,” and it is he who is the legitimate owner of the house; he has “all of the (Communist) committee’s paperwork” to back up his claims.74 In her analysis of the film, Võ Hồng Chương-Đài writes that “Hoimai and Chú Kỳ’s claims to ownership of the land rest on different systems of legitimacy—the former insists on family lineage whereas the latter asserts the authority of the state.”75 While Hoimai appeals to the force of tradition—his family’s long- term cultivation of the land—Chú Kỳ insists on the newfound government’s system of law and bureaucracy. In this scene, to what degree does Hoimai make a native claim to the land, similar in rhetoric to Palestinians’ insistence on the Right of Return, in the face of the Israeli government’s imposed Law of Return, which legitimizes Jewish immigration to Israel at the same time that it denies Palestinians access to the homes that they had lived in for generations, prior to forced

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displacement? When comparing these two cases of contested land claims—Vietnamese refugees in postwar Vietnam and Palestinians in the State of Israel—it is important to attend to historical specificity and acknowledge important differences. The Vietnam War was both a war against imperialism and a civil war, in which both the Vietnamese Communists and the anti-Communists projected a narrative of temporally-contiguous nativity to quê hương, the homeland of Vietnam. Although the Vietnamese state has been accused of settler colonial policies that discriminate against indigenous minority populations, Hoimai here is not an Indigenous minority, but rather an anti-Communist former landowner who left Vietnam as a refugee. In contrast, the Zionist foundation of Israel was characterized by a mass influx of Jewish immigrants and exiles whose claim to the land of Palestine was not temporally-contiguous, but rather articulated as a millennium-long longing for the Holy Land—an affective attachment that the State of Israel then codified as the Law of Return via the rhetoric of aliyah, which infuses Jewish immigration with the religious connotation of an accession. Both the Vietnamese government and the Israeli government deny the land claims of the families that fled their lands at the time of the government’s foundation—1975 and 1948 respectively—though in the Israeli case, the politics of difference is bolstered by the rhetoric of racial and religious difference, the Othering of the Arab Muslim Palestinian figure, regardless of demographic accuracy. Furthermore, the Israeli government continues to wield colonial control over Palestinians living within its ’48 borders and in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank—a degree of control that the Vietnamese government does not retain over its wayward post-war refugee diaspora. In Israel-Palestine, Vietnamese Israelis occupy a vexed political position in between Jewish Israelis and displaced Palestinians, between the Law of Return and the Right of Return. But outside of Israel-Palestine, in the homeland in Vietnam, the film raises the interesting question of how the refugee settler condition circulates diasporically: that is, whether Vietnamese Israelis returnees should be compared to Jewish Israelis or Palestinians, whether their Journey of Return is more akin to the Law or the Right of Return. When Vietnamese refugees try to reclaim their ancestral lands, are they asserting a birthright, akin to Jewish Israelis, or are challenging the legality of the newfound state’s land acquisition and redistribution, akin to displaced Palestinians? Or both? In order to answer this question, I’d like to point us toward another moment of cultural and linguistic translation, or mistranslation, in the film. In a scene towards the end of the film, Hoimai guides Vaan and the documentary film crew through tropical trees and rice fields in search of his father’s plot of land. As they walk, Hoimai asks on-looking villagers for directions, invoking the name of his father, Nguyễn Khác Minh, and they wave him forward down the road. After orienting himself, Hoimai raises his arms and calls out excitedly to the surrounding trees, “Ồ, ba má, con đây!”—“Oh father, mother, I’m here!” Vaan follows, asking her father (in Hebrew) where his house would be. He responds (in Vietnamese) that the house is most likely gone by now. Vaan spots another house nearby, and suggests (again in Hebrew) that they approach and inquire about Hoimai’s familial home. Switching to Hebrew, Hoimai replies that olim khadashim), or “new) ”עולים חדשים“ the neighbors probably wouldn’t know, since they are immigrants.” Surprised by the use of this term, which in the Israeli context refers specifically to Jewish immigrants who migrate to Israel under the Law of Return, Vaan parrots incredulously, Olim khadashim? Me-epho?) —“New immigrants? From where?” But) ”עולים חדשים? מאיפה?“ before the viewer gets a response, the scene ends and cuts to a different shot of Hoimai pointing out the vast reach of his ancestral lands while Vaan looks on admiringly. The scene blends into another in which Hoimai gives in to Vaan’s urging and approaches the nearby house to inquire

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whether there is any possibility that the new family will sell him back the lands, or make an exchange. The head of the family smiles but politely refuses, saying that his family is now at home in this village. They offer to allow Hoimai to build a house next door, but refuse to sell him the property. And here we come to the line from the trailer discussed above, in which the Vietnamese man tells Hoimai “Người ta nói, cuối cùng, không có đâu giống như quê hương”— “People say, in the end, there is no place like home.” Hoimai’s usage of the term “olim khadashim” translates this instance of Vietnamese refugee land reclamation into the vexed vocabulary of Israel-Palestine’s own contestations over ”derived from the word “aliyah ,(עולים חדשים) ”land dispossession. Recall that “olim khadashim .refers specifically to Jewish immigrants who “return” to the Jewish homeland of Israel ,(עֲלִיָּה) In identifying the post-war, Communist-sympathetic Vietnamese newcomers as “olim khadashim,” or “new immigrants” who have the backing of state authority, Hoimai implicitly positions himself as a dispossessed native Palestinian in this metaphor’s binary. Although such a metaphor risks ahistorical abstraction, and perhaps even political irresponsibility, I want to dwell with the possibilities opened up by this surprising translation. Hoimai translates the vocabulary of land rights so charged in the Israel-Palestine context into the post-war Vietnamese context, drawing the viewer’s attention to the postcolonial Vietnamese state’s discriminatory land reform policies. Such attention, furthermore, is marked by critique. Although the term “olim khadashim” is politically neutral, perhaps even celebratory of Jewish “return” to Israel, the film’s English subtitles for this scene add another complex layer of politicized rhetoric. The subtitles translate “olim khadashim” not as “new immigrants,” but as “settlers,” repeating the term twice: once for Hoimai’s assertion, and then again for Vaan’s surprised follow-up question. The term “settlers” has a distinctly negative connotation in contemporary international politics, implicating these new Jewish immigrants in the Zionist state’s settler colonial policies. By drawing parallels with the Israel-Palestine case, which has garnered global visibility and international concern, Hoimai’s usage of the term “olim khadashim,” and its English translation into “settlers,” directs international attention to the relatively under-discussed issues of Vietnamese refugee land dispossession. Although the film moves quickly past the moment, the scene did reach an international audience, given the international circulation of the film.

The Rhetoric of Return: Translating Across Multiple Diasporic Passages In “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin argues that the project of translating seamlessly between languages—of pushing past the limits of one’s own language in order to grasp another language’s syntax, symbols, and world view—is marked by a radical impossibility, an incommensurability. However, the very processing of attempting this impossible task produces greater enlightenment by moving us ever closer to the horizon of what he calls “pure language”: that which is greater than an expression or approximation of thought, but rather is the Word itself [with a capital “W]. If one attends to historical, cultural, and linguistic specificity, then the study of translation—how people, concepts, and ideas move across space, time, and context in an archipelagic fashion—can reveal surprising parallels, pointing us towards moments of potential solidarity between differentially situated populations. Translating between native, refugee, and exile, the exilic poetics of Vaan Nguyen and Mourid Barghouti, read in critical juxtaposition, reveals points of articulation between Vietnamese Israelis and displaced Palestinians across the impasse of settler colonialism, offering a political vocabulary that may one day be further translated into a social strategy of solidarity and settler decolonization. Translating the term “olim khadashim” from an Israel-Palestine context to a Vietnamese context,

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Hoimai Nguyen in The Journey of Vaan Nguyen draws attention to the Vietnamese state’s policies of land redistribution that dispossess diasporic Vietnamese refugees, and suggests a point of identification between Vietnamese Israelis and displaced Palestinians around the question of contested land rights. According to Vicente L. Rafael, translation “scatters meaning, displaces origins, and exposes the radical undecidability of references, names, and addresses.”76 By bringing into relation two or more seemingly distinct concepts or entities, translation invites risky infusions and promiscuous metaphors, revealing an archipelagic vision of a locally-situated yet interconnected world. The act of translating between the situated political subjectivities of Palestinians, Jewish Israelis, Vietnamese Israelis, and the larger Vietnamese diaspora, draws out convergences, contradictions, and potentials for solidarity, that both map onto and resist the imperial archipelago undergirding U.S. foreign power. Translating between diasporic rhetorics of Return—the Law, the Right, the Journey—this chapter theorizes new forms of pluralized belonging for Jewish, Palestinian, and Vietnamese populations.

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1 Adriana X. Jacobs, “Where You Are From: The Poetry of Vaan Nguyen,” Shofar 33, no. 4 (2015): 107. For more on “Guerilla Culture,” see http://www.gerila.co.il/he/content.aspx?iid=14 and https://shemoelof.wordpress.com/tag/culture-guerrilla/. According to Vaan Nguyen, the group disbanded in mid-2017. 2 Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Surname Viet Given Name Nam,” Film, 1989. 3 The Latin translatus, “carried over,” serves as a past participle of transferre, “to bring over, carry over.” Translate and transfer are thus etymologically related. 4 Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak, “Translation as Culture,” Parallax 6, no. 1 (2000): 13. 5 For early scholarship, see for example Gail Paradise Kelly, From Vietnam to America: A Chronicle of the Vietnamese Immigration to the United States (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977); Felix Moos and C. S. Morrison, “The Vietnamese Refugees at Our Doorstep: Political Ambiguity and Successful Improvisation,” Review of Policy Research 1, no. 1 (August 1981): 28–46. For a later generation of more critical scholarship coming out of Asian American studies, see for example Long T. Bui, “The Refugee Repertoire: Scripting the Experience of Displacement, Migration and Survival,” MELUS 41, no. 4 (2016): 112–32; Yến Lê Espiritu, “Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in US Scholarship,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, no. 1–2 (2006): 410–33; Yến Lê Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016); Vinh Nguyen, “Refugeography in ‘Post- Racial’ America: Bao Phi’s Activist Poetry,” MELUS 41, no. 3 (2016): 171–93; Thu-hương Nguyễn-võ, “Forking Paths: How Shall We Mourn the Dead?,” Amerasia Journal 31, no. 2 (2005): 157–75; Thuy Vo-Dang, “The Cultural Work of Anticommunism in the San Diego Vietnamese American Community,” Amerasia Journal 31, no. 2 (2005): 65–86. 6 Patrick Wolfe, “Purchase by Other Means: Dispossessing the Natives in Palestine,” in Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016), 203–38. 7 A parallel strategy can be seen in the way Israel upholds its liberal treatment of the LGBTQ community as means to divert attention away from its policies of settler colonialism and occupation. For more on this strategy of “pinkwashing,” see Jasbir K. Puar, “Rethinking Homonationalism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45 (2013): 336–39. 8 This analysis of the lack of political solidarity between Vietnamese Israelis and Palestinians is drawn from my fieldwork in Israel-Palestine during May 2015 and July-August 2016. 9 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Repr, Marxist Introductions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 132. 10 Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). Emphasis added. 11 Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, trans. Ahdaf Soueif, First Anchor Books Edition (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 4; This phrase echoes Edward Said’s assertion that “Exile is not, after all, a matter of choice: you are born into it, or it happens to you.” Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 146.

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12 In this essay, all citations of the original text, transcribed here in standard Romanized Arabic, are drawn from Murīd Barghūthī, Raʾaytu Rām Allāh (Bayrūt: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʻArabī, 1998). I would like to thank Shireen Hamza for her help transcribing the Arabic translations. 13 Edward W. Said, “Foreword,” in I Saw Ramallah, First Anchor Books Edition (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), vii; Anna Bernard, “‘Who Would Dare to Make It Into an Abstraction’: Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah,” Textual Practice 21, no. 4 (2007): 666. Emphasis in original. 14 Bernard, “‘Who Would Dare to Make It Into an Abstraction’: Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah,” 666. 15 Bernard, 666. 16 Jacobs, “Where You Are From,” 93. also invokes a word that refers to כמהי :contains a brilliant pun ,עַיִן ןהכמהי,The title in Hebrew 17 “yearning.” In this essay, all citations of the original Hebrew text are drawn from the version of that appears in Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts (נהר המקונג) ”Mekong River“ 27, no. 2 (2015): 56. 18 The full text is currently in the process of being translated into English by Adriana X. Jacobs. 19 In Druki Dror’s film The Journey of Vaan Nguyen, Nguyen comments that growing up in Israel has meant “identifying with the forced exile so familiar with the Jewish people.” For more on how Nguyen’s poetry fits into the Israeli literary tradition, see Jacobs. 20 Spivak, “Translation as Culture,” 13. 21 Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 4; Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,” Media, Culture, and Society 2 (1980): 68–69; Williams, Marxism and Literature, 132. 22 Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, 40–41. 23 For more on the material implications of settler colonial mapping projects, as well as how Native women writers resist and re-orient these maps with their own gendered geographies, see Goeman. 24 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 134; Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New ed, HB244 (New York: Harcourt, 1973), 267–302. 25 It is important to note that Israelis also declare a native claim to the land, citing a return to the biblical land of Israel after years in exile. These competing native claims are discussed further below. 26 Ella Shohat, “Taboo Memories, Diasporic Visions: Columbus, Palestine, and Arab-Jews,” in Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 201–32. 27 Bryan Cheyette, Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 28. 28 Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 144, 148–49. 29 Zahi Zalloua, Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 100–101. 30 Zalloua, 97. 31 Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, 13. 32 Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 148. 33 Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia Univeristy Press, 2012), 206.

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34 For more on bi-nationalism and the “one-state solution,” see Said (“Right of Return”), Žižek, Eid (“Palestinian Struggle” and “Gaza”), Abunimah, and Zalloua. 35 Homi Bhabha and Jonathan Rutherford, “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 211. 36 Timothy K. August, “Re-Placing the Accent: From the Exile to Refugee Position,” MELUS 41, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 68–88. 37 Jacobs, “Where You Are From,” 83. 38 Espiritu, Body Counts, 139–70; Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” Poetics Today, 1996, 659. 39 Nguyen was not Jewish at the time of The Truffle Eye’s publication. However, she has recently converted to Reform Judaism, one of the more liberal denominations. 40 Throughout this paper I will refer to “Vaan Nguyen” as “Vaan” rather than “Nguyen” in order to distinguish her from her father, Hoiami Nguyen. Furthermore, Nguyen is such a common Vietnamese last name, that it has become rather useless for identifying individuals. 41 Coby Ben-Simhon, “In Her Own Words,” Haaretz, March 27, 2008, accessed December 15, 2013, http://www.haaretz.com/in-her-words-1.242793. 42 This is based on interviews I conducted with Vietnamese Israelis during May 2015 and July- August 2016. These findings are corroborated by an unpublished sociolinguistic study conducted by Sabine Huynh in 2008 entitled “The Vietnamese Community in Israel: A Profile.” 43 David V. Bartram, “Foreign Workers in Israel: History and Theory,” The International Migration Review 32, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 303–25; Michael Ellman and Smain Laacher, Migrant Workers in Israel: A Contemporary Form of Slavery, ed. Sarah Han and Katherine Vanfassen (Copenhagen: Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network & International Federaion for Human Rights, 2003); Mya Guarnieri Jaradat, The Unchosen: The Lives of Israel’s New Others (London: Pluto Press, 2017); Sarah S. Willen, “Toward a Critical Phenomenology of ‘Illegality’: State Power, Criminalization, and Abjectivity among Undocumented Migrant Workers in Tel Aviv, Israel,” International Migration 45, no. 3 (2007): 8–36. 44 Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 149. 45 Vaan Nguyen, “Mekong River” in Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees, translated by Adriana X. Jacobs (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), 238–239. 46 Ibid., 238. 47 Yến Lê Espiritu, “The ‘We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome: US Press Coverage of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the ‘Fall of Saigon,” American Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2006): 330. In other poems, Nguyen more explicitly writes about travel to U.S. cities, manifesting the U.S.’s geopolitical entanglement with Vietnam and the Middle East in her writing. 48 Nguyen, “Mekong River,” 238. 49 Ibid., 238, emphasis added. 50 For more on nước, see for example Trinh T. Minh-ha, Forgetting Vietnam, Digital (Women Make Movies, 2015); Patricia Nguyễn, “Salt | Water : Vietnamese Refugee Passages, Memory, and Statelessness at Sea,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 45, no. 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2017): 94–111; Sang Thông Huỳnh, “Live by Water, Die for Water,” in Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, ed. Barbara Tran, Monique T. D. Truong, and Luu Truong Khoi (New York: Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 1998), vi–vii.

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51 Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, 41. 52 David Farrier, “Washing Words: The Politics of Water in Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 48, no. 2 (2012): 188; Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, 41. 53 Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, 41. 54 “Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari criticized notions of the root and, even perhaps, notions of being rooted. The root is unique, a stock taking all upon itself and killing all around it. In opposition they propose the rhizome, an enmeshed root system, a network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently. The notion of the rhizome maintains, therefore, the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a totalitarian root.” Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 11. 55 Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, 157, emphasis added. 56 Barghouti, 157. 57 Barghouti, 157. 58 Mishuana Goeman, Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 11. 59 Nguyen, “Mekong River,” 238. 60 Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, 38. 61 Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 138–40. 62 Yael Munk, “Duki Dror’s Journey of the Displaced,” Cinematheque, n.d. 63 Author’s conversation with Vaan Nguyen, Facebook Messenger, 15 Dec. 2017. 64 In this section, I will refer to Vaan Nguyen as “Vaan,” in order to distinguish her from her father. I will refer to her father by her Israeli name, “Hoimai,” which is how he is credited in the film’s credits. 65 Translations are from the film’s English subtitles. Duki Dror, The Journey of Vaan Nguyen, DVD, Documentary (Zygote Films, 2005). 66 Translations are from the film’s English subtitles. Dror. 67 Translation is from the English subtitles. Dror. 68 Võ Hồng Chương-Đài, “When Memories Collide: Revisiting War in Vietnam and in the Diaspora,” in Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia: Cultural Interpretation and Social Intervention, ed. David C. L. Lim and Hiroyuki Yamamoto (New York: Routledge, 2012), 78. 69 “19. Nguyen’s blog was hosted by Ma’ariv from 2002-2003 but is no longer active.” Jacobs, “Where You Are From,” 106. 70 Jacobs, 91. In a footnote, Jacobs elaborates: “She has worked as a journalist, covering arts and culture for the periodicals Zman Tel Aviv and Ma‘ariv, as well as other publications in Israel. As an actress, Nguyen has appeared on Israeli TV in the shows Hasufim and Lo hivtachti lach, and recently in the film Kidon, directed by Emmanuel Naccache” (107). 71 Translation provided by Adriana X. Jacobs, with the exception of “Vân (Vaan) is a synonym for cloud,” which Jacobs mistakenly translates as “Nguyen is a synonym for cloud.” I have also changed “Philippine” to “Filipino.” Otherwise, this translation is more accurate than the English subtitles provided in the film for this scene. See Jacobs, 100–101. 72 For a beautiful discussion of the Wizard of Oz truism “There is no place like home” in relation to Jewish diaspora theory, see Jonathan Boyarin, “Tropes of Home,” in Jewishness and the Human Dimension (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 74–88.

179

The) ”המסע של ואן“ :”The film’s Hebrew title also includes the Hebrew word for “journey 73 Journey of Vaan). I did not have access to Hebrew subtitle/text version of the film though, and in the ”מסע“ cannot verify if the Vietnamese man’s quote is also mistranslated with the word trailer’s Hebrew subtitles. 74 Translations of the film’s Vietnamese dialogue in this section are provided by Võ Hồng Chương-Đài. See Võ Hồng Chương-Đài, “When Memories Collide: Revisiting War in Vietnam and in the Diaspora,” 82–83. 75 Võ Hồng Chương-Đài, 82. 76 Vicente L. Rafael, “Translation, American English, and the National Insecurities of Empire,” in Formations of United States Colonialism, ed. Alyosha Goldstein (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 356.

180 Afterword: Refugee Futurities: Floating Islands on a Horizon of Care

“In the year 2049, a floating community was discovered eighty miles of the coast of Guam.” -Linh Dinh, “A Floating Community”

“The ocean cradles its history in the depths of its soul.” -Tuan Andrew Nguyen, The Island

In their recently published book-length manifesto on “seasteading,” Joe Quirk (a “Seavangelist”) and Patri Freidman (grandson of economist Milton Friedman and founder of The Seasteading Institute) extoll the virtues of “floating nations on the sea,” arguing that ocean-based living initiatives will restore the environment, enrich the poor, cure the sick, and liberate humanity from oppressive governments.1 Characterized as a “globally emerging Blue Revolution” and rooted in the libertarian belief that “a Silicon Valley of the Sea” will save humanity from overcrowding, global warming, poverty, and political repression, seasteading is spearheaded by technological visionaries and profit-driven philanthropists.2 According to Quirk and Freidman, “Our terrestrially trained minds are blind to the terrifying potential for tyranny in the power to claim land—fixed, immobile, where people have no choice but to live.”3 In contrast: “When individuals possessed the technology to settle the seas, they’d discover an aquatic world more than twice the size of Planet Earth, where citizens would engage in such fluidity of movement that tyrants would have a very hard time getting a foothold, and tyrants would be radically decentralized and shared.”4 Certain components of this seasteading initiative echo this dissertation’s critiques of nation-state borders and its interest in more archipelagic ways of thinking and living. This dissertation’s concerns, therefore, are not isolated to the specific case study of diasporic Vietnamese refugee history and memory. Rather, the lessons learned and theories proposed by this study resonate with the larger concerns of our time. The preceding chapters have too questioned the “national order of things” and the settler colonial ownership of Indigenous land, proposing a more fluid understanding of belonging via the Vietnamese concept of nước: water, country, homeland.5 They too have qualified land-based understandings of space and time with an archipelagic imaginary, mapping out diasporic interconnections between seemingly disparate sites and populations. The too have highlighted the importance of the figure of the ship in diasporic Vietnamese refugee subjectivity. Unlike Quirk and Friedman, however, this dissertation has grappled with racialized histories of war, displacement, colonialism, and occupation. Its vision of a sea-based futurity is marked by refugee passages and Indigenous resistance. Quirk and Friedman’s color-blind vision for a world of floating nations eerily reproduces settler colonial fantasies of uncharted lands—or in this case, seas—ripe for conquest. Indeed, seasteaders are considered pioneers charged with settling the “Blue Frontier”—a narrative that fails to account for existing Indigenous island lifeworlds and long histories of expert seafaring.6 Oil platforms, which disrupt ocean life, and cruise ships, which notoriously exploit racialized labor, are upheld as visionary models for the seasteading project. Libertarian in tone, The Seasteading Institute proposes the production of modular units that can detach, travel, and re- attach, offering seasteaders radical freedom to experiment with different modes of living and governance. Equally accountable to everyone—or perhaps, no one—seasteaders, as envisioned

181 by Quirk and Friedman, do not acknoweldge divergent histories of racial formation or the likely reproduction of existing hierarchies of social mobility. Who can choose to move, and who is forced to move? Who must fight for the right not to be moved? In this afterword, I ask: what would a seasteading project that takes into account Indigenous and refugee histories, epistemologies, and futurities look like? And en route to such a futurity, how might the refugee and Indigenous pasts discussed in this dissertation address the contemporary refugee crises of today, such as Syrian displacement? Warning about the increasing global instability produced by land-based civilizations, Quirk and Friedman write: “Humanity is poised to plunge in 2050. We can drown or we can float.”7 In the year 2049, on the brink of such an apocalypse, Vietnamese American author Linh Dinh reports that “a floating community was discovered eighty miles of the coast of Guam.”8 Such commences Dinh’s one-page futuristic story, “A Floating Community,” included in his 2004 anthology of short stories, Blood and Soap. In contrast to Quirk and Friedman’s utopic vision of seasteading, Dinh’s community is marked by histories of forced displacement and unsteady resettlement: the “ninety-nine individuals” floating precariously on “eleven rotting boats, lashed together by ropes,” surviving “on flying fish and rain water.”9 The sea meanwhile is considered both “holy and toxic,” the “final resting place of their ancestors,” those tens of thousands of refugees who drowned during the watery passage.10 In Dinh’s story, the refugee crises of the past continue to impress upon the future, upon the year 2049. The story invites us to speculate: What would have happened if the Vietnamese refugees never reached Guam, but rather remained afloat, suspended in transit, forming a floating community at sea? Here, Dinh conflates multiple waves of refugee passage: as outlined in chapter three, the Vietnamese refugees who were processed on Guam during Operation New Life arrived primarily by air or by naval ship. Most of these refugees had connections to the U.S. government and military, and could rely on such contacts for safe escort. In contrast, the Vietnamese “boat people,” such as the parents of Vietnamese Israeli poet Vaan Nguyen, discussed in chapter four, left Vietnam several years later on their own initiative, braving uncertain waters in order to flee Communist repression and a war-torn country. Such boat people more accurately fit Dinh’s description of individuals floating on “rotting boats, lashed together by ropes.” “A Floating Community” invites us to dwell within the temporality of refugee passage, to elongate the temporality of refugeehood, and to acknowledge how it continues to impress upon refugees presents and futures, passed along to subsequent generations as a form of post- memory.11 Such refugeehood extends beyond the initial event of absorption, offering one mode of unsettling a sense of resettlement—unsettling here taking on added importance in settler colonial contexts of Indigenous dispossession. The floating community represented in Dinh’s story also retains a certain fungibility, suggesting archipelagic connections between multiple displaced populations. Although the author speculates that that ninety-nine people might be “the last of the Vietnamese boat people,” they are ultimately described as “individuals of indeterminate nationality.”12 This indeterminacy of nationality—versus ethnicity or race—suggests a critique of nation-state borders, and the assumed bodily markers attached to national belonging. In other words, nationality is indeterminate, because the phenotypic markers of nationality are indeterminate. This indeterminacy opens up space for drawing parallels between Vietnamese refugees and other displaced populations, for connecting the crises of the past to contemporary refugee issues.

182 One vector of fungibility is the way Syrian refugees of today resonate with Vietnamese refugees of the 1970-80s, via shared subjectivities as “boat people.” Diasporic Vietnamese organizations have become some of the loudest proponents of refugee aid in the contemporary moment, a somewhat surprising phenomenon regarding the typically conservative, anti- Communist stance of such groups. Consider the 2015 video entitled “I Was A Boat Person: Vietnamese Refugees Look Back,” produced by AJ+, the YouTube channel of Al Jazeera (meaning “The Island”), a prominent Arabic news source. In this three minute, forty-one second video, Vietnamese Americans, such as authors Aimee Phan and Andrew Lam, Dean of the City College of San Francisco Minh-hoa Ta, and media consultant Sonny Le, attest to how the images of Syrian boat people circulating in the international media called to mind memories of their own watery passage via nước: “When I saw the picture of the little boys on the beach in Turkey, that brought back a lot of sad and horrifying memories” and “Oh, God, you look at homes in Aleppo, in Syria—Vietnam looked like that, after the war.”13 These auditory connections—voiced by Vietnamese diasporics, it must be noted, eliding a Syrian response—are layered over images of Syrian boat people juxtaposed against those of Vietnamese boat people from forty years earlier, highlighting visual parallels. Over a million Southeast Asian refugees have resettled in the U.S. since 1975—the largest resettlement program in U.S. history.14 However, this program was the last global resettlement initiative of its kind. Wary of how the past circulates back into the present, Vietnamese refugees and their descendants call upon the U.S. to again help refugees in need, insisting upon America’s responsibility for not only intervention in Vietnam, but also disruption in the Middle East. One refugee testifies: “If you look today, I mean at Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan—those people wouldn’t have left if it hadn’t been for regional conflicts, of which the U.S. has a hand in.” This is immediately followed, in this video’s editing, by another refugee’s demand for American accountability: “I truly believe that all the nations that support the war are the nations that are responsible, and should have the moral obligation to resettle all those refugees.”15 American intervention begets American responsibility. American forced displacement begets American refugee resettlement. In Canada, too, stories of Vietnamese groups raising money and sponsoring Syrian refugees also circulate prominently.16 But what about the problem of refugee settlers, as outlined in the preceding chapters of this dissertation? What are the ethics of refugee settlers inviting other waves of refugees onto stolen Indigenous land? The United States and Canada, it must be noted, are white settler states. Vietnamese American and Canadian refugees are therefore implicated in the ongoing settlement of Indigenous land. By way of working though this question, I turn to the two sites of refugee resettlement discussed in this dissertation: Israel-Palestine and Guam. In September 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel would not be accepting Syrian refugees. Although opposition leader Isaac Herzog argued that the Jewish people, having themselves felt the “world’s silence” during World War II, could not “remain indifferent” to the Syrian refugees’ plight, Netanyahu stressed the precarity of Israel’s Jewish demographic majority, and the need to secure Israel’s borders against “illegal migrants and terrorism”—a conflation that racialized the Syrian refugees en total as a Arab Muslim threat, akin to Israel’s racialization of Palestinians as a national security threat.17 Indeed, Immigrant Absorption Minister Zeev Elkin referenced the Palestinian refugee population in Syria specifically. In 1948, following Israel’s declaration of independence, remembered by Palestinians as al-Nakba, about 70,000 Palestinians fled to Syria, where they were administered to in camps run by the General Authority for Palestine Arab Refugees (GAPAR) and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). Following the Lebanon

183 War of 1982, several thousand additional Palestinians left Lebanon for Syria. Elkin expressed concern that the Syrian refugee crisis would offer Palestinians in Syrian an opportunity to bring the Right of Return “through the back door.”18 In contrast, those who supported aid for Syrian refugees suggested a token action akin to that of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who absorbed 366 Vietnamese refugees in the late 1970s. Such an act might not assuage the Syrian refugee crises, but it would help Israel’s image in the international sphere, directing attention away from Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and upholding Israel’s self-image as a nation of Holocaust refugees compassionate towards other refugees in need. In Simona Weinglass’s 2015 article in the Times of Israel entitled “35 Years On, Where are Israel’s Vietnamese Refugees?”, Vaan Nguyen critiques Prime Minister Netanyahu’s exclusion of Syrian refugees, asserting that “compassion has no race.”19 Yet she is also careful to qualify her argument, distinguishing it from those who hope to recuperate Israel’s image in the international area in order to perpetuate Israel’s status quo discrimination against, and dispossession of, its Palestinian population: “Bibi will only enhance his resume if he absorbs a few hundred refugees who will not change Israel’s demographic balance one iota. My family is not thriving here, but they have hope and a future. It’s all relative: at least we’re alive.”20 Here, Nguyen refuses to play the role of the grateful refugee—she insists that her family is “not thriving”—yet she also pragmatically advocates the absorption of Syrian refugees, acknowledging the material violence of displacement and statelessness. In the late 1970s, Israel absorbed Vietnamese refugees in order to cement its self-image as a Western, humanitarian nation. Four decades later, Israel closes its borders to Syrian refugees in need—perhaps again following the U.S.’s example, given America’s own tightening of borders and racist coding of Syrian refugees as potential terrorist threats. In such a context, it is up to the refugee settler, the Vietnamese Israeli, to call for compassion, for a temporary respite from the uncertain waves at sea. In his 2016 poem “Care,” Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez, born on Guam and currently living in Hawai’i, offers us a model for such compassion that acknowledges rather than disavows Western culpability in the conditions that produce refugee displacement, and that articulates an Indigenous invitation to refugees that moves us beyond troubling binaries produced by the refugee settler condition. That is, to critique settler colonial states and military institutions for absorbing refugees in order to reframe themselves as humanitarian actors, directing attention away from ongoing struggles for decolonization, is not to argue that such states should therefore close their borders to refugees, negating the production of a refugee settler condition. Rather, it is to suggest that refugee resettlement is both necessary, and in need of unsettlement. Resettlement, in other words, must acknowledge Indigenous claims to settled land. “Care” refracts Perez’s admiration for Syrian refugee resilience through his owns efforts to soothe and protect his then sixteen-month-old daughter. Speculating on what would happen if the space between Syria and his current home on the island of O’ahu were to suddenly collapse, the “Pacific trade winds suddenly [becoming] helicopters” and the shadows cast by “plumeria/ tree branches” morphing into “soldiers and terrorists marching/in heat,” Perez asks himself if he would be able to display the same strength and fortitude as those Syrian refugees fleeing war and instability.21 Here, Syrian refugee passage is marked by water, by hånom, by nước, calling to mind the passage of Vietnamese boat people, four decades earlier: “Would we reach the desperate boats of/the Mediterranean in time? If we did, could I straighten/my legs into a mast, balanced against the pull and drift/of the current?”22 Water here, represented as “the current,” is,

184 as in Dinh’s “A Floating Community,” both “holy and toxic,” a potential “final resting place” for those lost at sea.23 Indeed, Perez queries what would happen “if we didn’t make landfall”: . . . What if here capsized? Could you inflate your body into a buoy

to hold your child above rising waters? “Daddy’s here, daddy’s here,” I whisper. Drowning is

the last lullaby of the sea.24 This mode of speculation—“What if . . . ?”—marks this poem as part of genre of speculative fiction, akin to Dinh’s “A Floating Community.” Although Perez’s poem is rooted firmly in the present, rather than in the future (2049), it too is concerned with refugee futurity: with the speculative life of refugeehood, and with the resilience of refugee survival into the future. “Care” ends with a call to action to Western countries to open their homes to those in need of refuge, compelled not by paternalistic benevolence, but by the instructive teaching of refugees, whose resilient love defies borders: To all the parents who brave the crossing: you and your children matter. I hope your love will teach the nations

that emit the most carbon and violence that they should, instead, remit the most compassion. I hope, soon,

the only difference between a legal refugee and an illegal migrant will be how willing

we are to open our homes, offer refuge, and carry each other towards the horizon of care.25 In these stanzas, refugees are not represented as helpless victims, but as pedagogical instructors of compassion; resettlement nations, in turn, are not humanitarian saviors, but responsible perpetrators of violence and global warming, who should learn from refugees. Here, a “horizon of care” indexes an opening of homes, an offering of refuge, that does not reify the power of nation-states, but rather suggests a multiplicity of belonging: one that can account for Indigenous and refugee presence alike. Originally published in May 2016, this poem reverberates with ever more urgency in this present moment, given the increasing displacement of Syrian refugees by chemical warfare, governmental dictatorship, and foreign air strikes, and the harrowing closure of American borders under a nationalist Trump regime. If the current rate of international war, militarism, and environmental degradation continues, then a refugee futurity—understood here as a future of perpetual refugehood—would not be circumscribed to refugee communities, but rather would affect humanity writ large. In The Island, a forty-two minute video installation produced in 2017 and included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Tuan Andrew Nguyen interweaves Vietnamese refugee pasts with a post- apocalyptic future, in which a male Vietnamese refugee and a female United Nations scientist are the only two humans who survive a global nuclear battle. Set sometime around 2049, the year of Dinh’s “A Floating Community,” The Island takes place on Pulau Bidong, an island off the coast Malaysia, which served as the largest and longest-operating Southeast Asian refugee camp following the Vietnam War.26 Roughly 250,000 refugees, boat people who had fled Vietnam, inhabited the tiny island from 1978 until 1991, when the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees closed the camp and repatriated the remaining refugees back to 185 Vietnam. In The Island, the unnamed refugee character escapes repatriation and attends to the island alone, rebuilding a memorial commemorating the Vietnamese boat people and serving as an oral archive for the human race after nuclear annihilation: “The last wars made refugees out of the entire world. I am now the last on Earth. The one that carries the voices.”27 About a quarter of the way into the video installation’s runtime, the UN scientist washes upon the shore of Pulau Bidong, set adrift when her home, “one of the last ships on the ocean” that had been working towards nuclear disarmament, was destroyed: “I must have floated for over a month. No map. No record of how long”—a dystopian version of Quirk and Friedman’s seasteading future.28 The video installation cuts between archival footage of the Vietnamese refugee camp from the 1970- 80s, home videos of refugees returning to Pulau Bidong years later to pay their respects, and scenes shot by Tuan Andrew Nguyen to represent Pulau Bidong in the future. Nguyen’s refugee, played by Phạm Anh Khoa, speaks exclusively in Vietnamese accompanied by English subtitles, while the UN scientist, played by Donika Do Tinh, responds in English accompanied by Vietnamese subtitles. The two communicate with mutual intelligibility, though they clash in their vision of how to move forward in the wake of global nuclear destruction. Their dialogue is interrupted twice by Khánh Ly’s famous song, “Ngày Mai Em Đi”—“Tomorrow You Depart”— which refugees would sing whenever people arrived or departed from the island. How does one rebuild after global disaster? The video installation’s climax, which occurs three-quarters of the way into its runtime, is marked by a clash between the refugee and the scientist. The latter becomes frustrated with refugee’s seeming insularity, with his refusal to care about life beyond the island’s confines. She stresses that they are the only two people left on earth, to which the refugee responds: “So this is the last refugee camp?”29 This line recalls the specificity of Vietnamese refugeehood on Pulau Bidong, as well as suggests a finality to the condition of refugeehood writ large: no future camp will be necessary, for this is “the last.” But the scientist, more practical and global in her concerns, insists: “It is the only refuge now. But it won’t be for long. We have to think about the future. We have to think of leaving the island. We have to rebuild. We have to repopulate.” For the scientist, futurity exists beyond the island, which she interprets via the tropes on insularity. The argument continues: Refugee: “You think we live in a fairy tale like the Mountain Fairy and the Dragon King?” Scientist: “What I am talking about is not the origin story of the nation. It’s the opposite. I am talking about the end of the world, and our responsibility to think of the future.” Refugee: “A future for who?” Scientist: “For us. For humans.” Refugee: “You’ve seen the brutality humans have caused.” Scientist: “What do you know about anything? You’ve been on an island your entire life. Have you ever imagined an elsewhere?” Refugee: “In that case, we are going to end the brutality right here. In the most gentle way possible.”30 In this vision of global history, memory, and futurity, Vietnamese mythology is not secondary, but rather central. Recall the story of the Mountain Fairy and the Dragon King that opened this dissertation’s introduction: the pair bore one hundred children, who then split, half following their mother to the mountains, and half following their father to the sea. Nguyen’s refugee observes that this is a “story of how the past predicted the future. Seems we’ve been caught between separation and exodus ever since.” “Future” here refers both to the Vietnamese refugee exodus of the 1970-80s, as well as the future of 2049, post-nuclear destruction. Vietnamese

186 refugeehood, The Island suggests, is not incidental, but instrumental in understanding the post- apocalyptic future of our current world order. Importantly, the recuperation of such future, according to the scientist, consists not of the creation of new nation-states, but “the opposite”— the global nuclear destruction serving as a clearing, an opening, to reorganize the world anew around multiplicitous belonging, as theorized in this dissertation’s preceding chapters. But Nguyen’s refugee character takes a more Indigenous cosmological approach, recognizing the brutality of humans responsible for the environmental and nuclear destruction that wipes out humanity—in short, the teleological end of the contemporary anthropocene. He instead acknowledges the possibility of a better world without humans, with the emergence of other lifeworlds and nonhuman communities. Whereas the scientist hopes to recuperate humanity, the refugee suggests we give way to another world order, to what may come next. Such a vision is not characterized by defeat, however, but by a different form of refugee resilience, another iteration of the weight of the past upon the present and future. Although the video installation’s final image consists of the back of a standing individual suddenly ducking and disappearing into the ocean—the figure’s gender ambiguity suggesting either the refugee’s or the scientist’s body—this visual disappearance is uncut by the auditory track’s insistence, in the Vietnamese refugee’s voice, that “We must keep afloat.” This is preceded by the intonation, the biting question: We exist only in the traces we leave behind. And those traces are echoed only in our memories of them. The relics, the mementos, the mythologies, the mysteries, the memorials, the monuments. All in an ocean of sinking memories. Which ones do we cling to in order to keep adrift?31 “We must keep afloat”: Vietnamese and Syrian refugees, as boat people, must survive—through memories, through teachings, through traces. Yet this survival is not predicated on the disavowal of one’s watery passage, of one’s escape via nước. We must “keep adrift”: Water offers another mode of survival, of unsettlement—one that resists the comfort of permanent resettlement and resists the lure to claim contested land, Indigenous land, solely for oneself. In this dissertation, I have argued for the importance of a diasporic refugee history, for a history that continues to impress upon the present, and present conditions of possibility for solidarity between refugees and Indigenous populations across the impasses of settler colonialism. Yet history must not be uncritically memorialized. We must sift through the traces of the past, to figure out which ones “we cling to in order to keep adrift.” I suggest we let go of our attachment to traces of settler colonialism, refugee displacement, and nation-state exclusion, working instead toward an archipelago of multiplicitous belonging. In the above exchange between the refugee and the scientist in The Island, the scientist faults the refugee for caring only about Pulau Bidong, and by extension ignoring the plight of the rest of humanity, the rest of the globe. Yet the refugee reminds us that specificity is not in opposition to globality, and that rather one can only begin to address global questions regarding history, memory, displacement, and nước through specific case studies and situated contexts. Furthermore, no island is in isolation, but rather is part of a larger archipelago, a “sea of islands,” to quote Epeli Hau’ofa.32 The Island recalls another island of importance in Vietnamese refugee history: the island of Guam, which served as the first major U.S. processing center for Vietnam War refugees in 1975. Israel-Palestine, in turn, is also caught up in this story. Recall that the Malaysian Prime Minister’s 1979 declaration to close its borders and tow away refugee boats seeking landfall, and the attendant rumor that Malaysian officials would start shooting at the Vietnamese boat people to deter arrival, was what spurred Israeli Prime Minister Menachem

187 Begin to implore world leaders to respond to the Southeast Asian refugee crisis, and to absorb 200 more refugees into the State of Israel in turn, including Vaan Nguyen’s parents. Indeed, The Island asserts that Vietnamese refugee history impresses upon not only the Vietnam War diaspora, but upon the world writ large. Pulau Bidong is both a cautionary tale against global refugeehood, as well as the cradle of new world order post-global destruction. Pulau Bidong was “An island that became a refuge. The second country. An in-between existence.”33 This in-betweenness marks a space of transition, between one home and another, one world and another. But it is also, according to the refugee, “A space between life and death, land and sea, past and future.” Like nước, an island bridges land and water. Like the present, it connects past and future. Only by uncovering refugee pasts, and working through the refugee settler condition in the present, can we begin to theorize archipelagic connections between locally-situated struggles for refugee futurity and Indigenous resilience. Only then can we keep afloat.

188

1 Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman, Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity from Politicians (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 5. 2 Quirk and Friedman, 7, 10. 3 Quirk and Friedman, 7. 4 Quirk and Friedman, 8. 5 Liisa H. Malkki, “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 495–523. 6 Quirk and Friedman, Seasteading, jacket cover. 7 Quirk and Friedman, 6. 8 Linh Dinh, “A Floating Community,” in Blood and Soap: Stories (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), 59. 9 Dinh, 59. 10 Dinh, 59. 11 Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” Poetics Today, 1996, 659–86. 12 Dinh, “A Floating Community,” 59. 13 AJ+ Video, I Was A Boat Person: Vietnamese Refugees Look Back, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQTviKM9Mx0. 14 AJ+ Video. 15 AJ+ Video. 16 Cassandra Szklarski, “Vietnamese-Canadian ‘Boat People’ Rally to Sponsor Syrian Refugees,” The Canadian Press, December 9, 2015, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/vietnamese-boat-people-rally-to-sponsor- syrian-refugees/article27661190/; Carol Kuruvilla, “Vietnamese Refugee In Canada Now Helping Syrian Family Resettle,” Huffpost, January 6, 2017, sec. The World Post, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/vietnam-refugee-sponsors-syrian-family- canada_us_586e7171e4b099cdb0fbb391. 17 Batsheva Sobelman, “One Country that Won’t Be Taking Syrian Refugees: Israel,” Los Angeles Times, 6 Sept. 2015, . 18 Sobelman, “One Country.” 19 Simona Weinglass, “35 years on, where are Israel’s Vietnamese refugees?” Times of Israel, 20 Sept. 2015. 20 Ibid. 21 Craig Santos Perez, “Care,” in Poem-A-Day (Academy of American Poets, 2016), https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/care. 22 Perez. 23 Dinh, “A Floating Community,” 59. 24 Perez, “Care.” 25 Perez. 26 The Island does not mention a specific year. However, the UN scientist character remarks to the Vietnamese refugee, who appears as a fit man in his thirties, “Wait, you can’t be that old. You can’t be over 80 years old!” If we assume the refugee arrived on Pulau Bidong in 1978, when he was about eleven years old, then that would place the time of the film around 2049.

189

27 Tuan Andrew Nguyen, The Island, Video Installation, 2017. This observation is made in Vietnamese. Translation provided by the video installation’s English subtitles. 28 Nguyen. 29 Nguyen. 30 Nguyen. 31 Nguyen. 32 Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 148– 61. 33 Nguyen, The Island.

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